Philosophy and Social Hope

RICHARD RORTY

Philosophy and Social Hope

PENGUIN BOOKS

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Contents

Preface

ix xu

Introduction: Relativism: Finding and Making

XV!

Acknowledgements

I Autobiographical I.

Trotsky and the Wild Orchids

3

II Hope in Place of Knowledge: A Version of Pragmatism 2. Truth without Correspondence to Reality

23

3. A World without Substances or Essences

47 72

4. Ethics Without Principles

III Some Applications of Pragmatism 5. The Banality of Pragmatism and the Poetry ofJustice 6. Pragmatism and Law: A Response to David Luban

93 104

7. Education as Socialization and as Individualization 8. The Humanistic Intellectual: Eleven Theses

114 127

viii

9. The Pragmatist's Progress: Umberto Eco on Interpretation 10.

Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility and Romance

Acknowledgements

II.

Religion As Conversation-stopper

12.

Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics

175

13. On Heidegger's Nazism

IV Politics 14. Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes

201

15. A Spectre is Haunting the Intellectuals: Derrida on Marx

210

16. Love And Money

223

17. Globalization, the Politics ofldentity and Social Hope

229

V Contemporary America 18.

Looking Backwards from the Year

19· The Unpatriotic Academy 20.

Back to Class Politics

MteIWord: Pragmatism, Pluralism and Postmodernism Index

209 6

The pieces in this book were originally published in the following places (copyright Richard Rorty unless otherwise marked): Introduction: 'Relativism: Finding and Making': Debating tIu Stale '!! Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty and Kolokowski, Jozef Niznik and John T. Sanders, eds. (Praeger, 1996). Copyright © Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science, 1996. Reprinted by permission. I. 'Trotsky and the Wild Orchids': Wild Orchids and Trotslg: Messages .from American Universities, Mark Edmundson, ed; (New York: Viking, 1993). Copyright © Viking, 1993. Reprinted by permission. 2. 'Truth without Correspondence to Reality': First appearance in English; a German translation appeared in my Hrljfnung statt Erlrmtniss (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1994); a French translation appeared in my L'espair au lim de savoir (paris: Albin Michel, 1995). 3. 'A World without Substances or Essences': First appearance in English; a German translation appeared in my Hrljfnung statt Erkmtniss (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1994); a French translation appeared in my L'espoir au lieu de savoir (paris: Albin Michel, 1995). 4. 'Ethics without Principles': First appearance in English; a German translation appeared in my Hrdfoung statt Erkmtniss (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1994); a French translation appeared in my L'espoir au lim de savoir (paris: Albin Michel, 1995). 5. 'The Banality of Pragmatism and the Pqetry ofJustice': Pragmatism in Law and Society, Michael Brint and William Weaver, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1991), pp. Bg-97. First published in Southern Californw Law Review. Copyright © Southern California Law Review, 1990. Reprinted by permission.

1:T"', 6. 'Pragmatism and Law: A Response to David Luban': Cardozo Law I. Copyright © 1996, Yeshiva University. Reprinted by permission. 7. 'Education as Socialization and as Individualization': originally published as 'Education without Dogma', Dissent (Spring 1989), pp. 198-204. Copyright © Dissent, 1989. Reprinted by permission. B. 'The Humanistic Intellectual: Eleven Theses': A CLS Occasional Papers (November 1989), no. 10, pp. 9-12. Reprinted by permission. g. 'The Pragmatist's Progress: Umberto Eco on Interpretation': Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Stefan Collini, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 89-108. Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 1992. Reprinted by permission. 10. 'Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility and Romance': The Cambridge Companion to William James, Ruth Anna Putnam, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 84-102. Copyright © Cambridge UniversitY Press, 1997. Reprinted by permission. II. 'Religion as Conversation-stopper': Common Knowledge (Spring 1994), vol. III, no. I, pp. 1-6. Copyright © Common Knowledge, 1994. Reprinted by permission. 12. 'Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics': Common Knowledge (Spring 1997), vol. VI, no. I. Copyright © Common Knowledge, 1997. Reprinted by permission. 13. 'On Heidegger's Nazism': Originally published as 'Another Possible World' in the London Review tif Books (8 February 1990), p. 21. Copyright © London Review ofBooks, 1990. Reprinted by permission. 14. 'Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes': FIrst appeared as 'Endlich sieht man Freudenthal' in FranlifUrter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 February 1998. Copyright © FAZ, 1998. Reprinted by permission. 15. 'A Spectre is Haunting the Intellectuals: Derrida on Marx': European JouTTUlI tif Philosop~ (December 1995), vol. III, no. 3, pp. 289-98. Copyright © European Journal of Philosophy, 1995. Reprinted by permission. 16. 'Love and Money': Common Knowledge (Spring 1992), vol. I, no. I, pp. 12-16. Copyright © Common Knowledge, 1992. Reprinted by permission. 17. 'Globalization, the Politics ofIdentity and Social Hope': originally

Review, vol. XXVIII, no.

published as 'Global Utopias, History and Philosophy' in Cultural Pluralism, IdentiJ;y and Globalization, Luiz Soares, ed. (Rio de Janiero: UNESCO/ISSC/EDUCAM, 1996), pp. 457-6g· lB. 'Looking Backwards from the Year 2096': originally published as 'Fraternity Reigns' in The New Tunes Magazine, 28 September 1996 , PP·155- 8 . Ig. 'The Unpatriotic Academy': 1heNew York Tunes, 13 February 1994, section 4, p. 15 (op-ed page). Copyright © 1he New York Tunes, 1994· Reprinted by permission. 20. 'Back to Class Politics': Dissent (Winter 1997), pp. 31-4. Copyright © Dissent, 1997. Reprinted by permission.

Preface

Most of what I have written in the last decade consists of attempts to tie in my social hopes - hopes for a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society - with my antagonism towards Platonism. These attempts have been encouraged by the thought that the same hopes, and the same antagonism, lay behind many of the writings of my principal philosophical hero,John Dewey. 'Platonism' in the serise in which I use the term does not denote the (very complex, shifting, dubiously consistent) thoughts of the genius who wrote the Dialogues. Instead, it refers to a set of philosophical distinctions (appearance-reality, matter-mind, made-found, sensible-intellectual, etc.): what Dewey called 'a brood and nest of dualisms'. These dualisms dominate the history ofWestern philosophy, and can be traced back t~ one or another passage in Plato's writings. Dewey thought, as I do, that the vocabulary which centres around these traditional distinctions has become an obstacle to our social hopes. Much of the material in this volume repeats theses and arguments previously put forward in the three volumes of Philosophical Papers which I have published with Cambridge University Press. l Those volumes consisted of papers written for philosophical journals, or for conferences attended mostly by philosophy professors. In this volume, I am reprinting pieces of two other sorts: first, lectures'intended for a so-called 'general audience' (that is, students and teachers in colleges and universities, as opposed to gatherings of specialists in philosophy); second, occasional contributions to newspapers and magazines, mostly on political or semi-political topics. Most of these essays contain fewer footnotes than do those included in Philosophical Papers. I hope that this new collection may interest an audience wider than the one to which those volumes were directed.

Section I of this volume is a bit of autobiography, explaining how, early on, I found myself moving away from Plato in the direction of Dewey. Section II consists of three lectures given in Vienna and Paris in 1993 under the heading 'Hope in Place of Knowledge', originally published in French and German. 2 I thought about expanding and revising them, but have finally decided to publish them in English pretty much as given. They offer a fairly simple, albeit sketchy, outline of my own version of pragmatism. This version makes no pretence of being faithful to the thoughts of either James or Dewey (much less Peirce, whom I barely mention). Rather, it offers my own, sometimes idiosyncratic, restatements ofJamesian and Deweyan themes. My choice of themes, and my ways of rephrasing them, result from my conviction thatJames's and Dewey's main accomplishments were negative, in that they explain how to slough off a lot of intellectual baggage which we inherited from the Platonic tradition. Each of the three essays, therefore, has a title of the form ' - without -', where the first blank is filled by something we want to keep and the second something whichJames and Dewey enabled us, if not exactly to throw away, at least to understand in a radically un-Platonic way. The title 'Hope in Place of Knowledge' is a way of suggesting that Plato and Aristotle were wrong in thinking that humankind's most distinctive and praiseworthy capacity is to know things as they really are - to penetrate behind appearance to reality. That claim saddles us with the unfortunate appearance-reality distinction and with metaphysics: a distinction, and a discipline, which pragmatism shows us how to do without. I want to demote the quest for knowledge from the status of end-in-itself to that of one more means towards greater human happiness. My candidate for the most distinctive and praiseworthy human capacity is our ability to trust and to cooperate with other people, and in particular to work together so as to improve the future. Under favourable circumstances, our use ofthis capacity culminates in utopian political projects such as Plato's ideal state, Christian attempts to realize the kingdom of God here on earth, and Marx's vision of the victory of the proletariat. These projects aim at improving our institutions in such a way that our descendants will be still better able to trust and cooperate, and will be more decent people than we

xiv

ourselves have managed to be. In our century, the most plausible project of this sort has been the one to which Dewey devoted his political efforts: the creation of a social democracy; that is, a classless, casteless, egalitarian society. I interpret James and Dewey as giving us advice on how, by getting rid of the old dualisms, we can make this project as central to our intellectual lives as it is to our political lives. In section III, I embark on some little expeditions out from philosophy into various neighbouring areas ofculture: jurisprudence, literary criticism, religion, science and, in a little paper written just for kicks, Heidegger - not exactly an area of culture but now the name given, as Auden said of Freud, to a whole climate of opinion. In these pieces, which were inspired by one or another current controversy, I try to show how these areas look when seen through pragmatist eyes. Section IV is also made up mostly of pieces which take sides in some current debate, but here the debates are explicitly about politics. The four pieces in this section discuss our chances of achieving a democratic utopia. For various reasons which these pieces spell out, I think these chances are pretty dim. But I do not think that is a reason to change our political goal. There is no more worthy project at hand; we have nothing better to do with our lives. In the concluding section V, I have included pretty much everything I published about the present sociopolitical situation in the United States prior to my Achieving Our Country (Harvard University Press, 1998). These pieces are run-ups to that book. By including them I hope to supplement the more general reflections on contemporary politics which make up section IV with discussion of some concrete problems. Because I keep finding myself referred to as a 'postmodemist relativist', I have begun this volume with an essay called 'Relativism: Finding and Making' and ended it with an Mterword called 'Pragmatism, Pluralism and Postmodemism' (the only previously unpublished piece in the book). I think that 'relativism' and 'postmodemism' are words which never had any clear sense, and that both should be dropped from our philosophical vocabulary. A philosophical view which was propounded in detail before the First World War is not happily described as 'postmodem', even though there is considerable overlap between that

view and those held by such post-Nietzschean European thinkers as Heidegger and Derrida. 'Relativism' is as misleading a description of the views of these latter figures as it is of those of James or Dewey. Serious discussion of any of these four philosophers is only possible if one does not assume that lack of an appearance-reality distinction entails that every action or belief is as good as every other. I hope that the papers in this volume may help convince people that relativism is a bugbear, and that the real question about the utility ofthe old Platonic dualisms is whether or not their deployment weakens our sense of human solidarity. I read Dewey as saying that discarding these dualisms will help bring us together, by enabling us to realize that trust, social cooperation and social hope are where our humanity begins and ends. I am grateful to Stefan McGrath for the suggestion that I collect some of my recent non-technical pieces for this volume, and to Sally Holloway for careful copy-editing and many helpful suggestions. I have dedicated this collection to the institution at which its contents were written: the University of Virginia, of which I was Emeritus Professor of the Humanities. By offering me a non-departmental university professorship - a sort of freelance arrangement unique, I believe, to US universities - Mr Jefferson's university made it possible for me to teach and write about anything I pleased, when and as I pleased. I am most grateful both to the university itself, and to the colleagues and students who made my 15 years in Charlottesville so happy and so productive.

* * * * NOTES I My Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers and Essays on HeUkgger and Others: Philosophical Papers 2 were both published by Cambridge University Press in 1991. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers 3 was published in 1998. 2 HoJfoung sfLltt Erlrmtniss (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1994); L'espoir au lieu de savoir (paris: Albin Michel, 1995).

Introduction: Relativism: Finding and Making (1996) The epithet 'relativist' is applied to philosophers who agree with Nietzsche that' "Truth" is the will to be master of the multiplicity of sensations'. It is also applied to those who agree with William James that 'the "true" is simply the expedient in the way of believing' and to those who agree with Thomas Kuhn that science should not be thought of as moving towards an accurate representation of the way the world is in itself. More generally, philosophers are called 'relativists' when they do not accept the Greek distinction between the way things are in themselves and the relations which they have to other things, and in particular to human needs and interests. Philosophers who, like myself, eschew this distinction must abandon the tradition~ philosophical project of finding something stable whIch will serve as a criterion for judging the transitory products of our transitory needs and interests. This means, for example, that we cannot employ the Kantian distinction between morality and prudence. We have to give up on the idea that there are unconditional, transcultural moral obligations, obligations rooted in an unchanging, ahistorical human nature. This attempt to put aside both Plato and Kant is the bond which links the post-Nietzschean tradition in European philosophy with the pragmatic tradition in American philosophy. The philosopher whom I most admire, and of whom I should most like to think of myself as a disciple, isJohn Dewey. Dewey was one of the founders of American pragmatism. He was a thinker who spent 60 years trying to get us out from under the thrall ofPlato and Kant. Dewey was often denounced as a relativist, and so am I. But of course we pragmatists never call ourselves relativists. Usually, we define ourselves in negative terms. We call ourselves 'anti-Platonists' or 'antimetaphysicians' or 'antifoundationalists'. Equally, our opponents almost

never call themselves 'Platonists' or 'metaphysicians' or 'foundationalists'. They usually call themselves defenders of common sense, or of reason. Predictably, each side in this quarrel tries to define the terms of the quarrel in a way favourable to itself. Nobody wants to be called a Platonist, just as nobody wants to be called a relativist or an irrationalist. We so-called 'relativists' refuse, predictably, to admit that we are enemies of reason and common sense. We say that we are only criticizing some antiquated, specifically philosophical, dogmas. But, of course, what we call dogmas are exactly what our opponents call common sense. Adherence to these dogmas is what they call being rational. So discussion between us and our opponents tends to get bogged down in, for example, the question of whether the slogan 'truth is correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality' expresses common sense, or is just a bit of outdated Platonist jargon. In other words, one of the things we disagree about is whether this slogan embodies an obvious truth which philosophy must respect and protect, or instead simply puts forward one philosophical view among others. Our opponents say that the correspondence theory of truth is so obvious, so self-evident, that it is merely perverse to question it. We say that this theory is barely intelligible, and ofno particular importance - that it is not so much a theory as a slogan which we have been mindlessly chanting for centuries. We pragmatists think that we might stop chanting it without any harmful consequences. One way to describe this impasse is to say that we so-called 'relativists' claim that many of the things which common sense thinks are found or discovered are really made or invented. Scientific and moral truths, for example, are described by our opponents as 'objective', meaning that they are in some sense out there waiting to be recognized by us human beings. So when our Platonist or Kantian opponents are tired of calling us 'relativists' they call us 'subjectivists' or 'social constructionists'. In their picture of the situation, we are claiming to have discovered that something which was supposed to come from outside us really comes from inside us. They think of us as saying that what was previously thought to be objective has turned out to be merely subjective. But we anti-Platonists must not accept this way offormulating the issue. For if we do, we shall be in serious trouble. If we take the distinction between making and finding at face value, our opponents

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will be able to ask us an awkward question, viz., Have we discovered the surprising fact that what was thought to be objective is actually subjective, or have we invented it? If we claim to have discovered it, if we say that it is an objective fact that truth is subjective, we are in danger of contradicting ourselves. If we say that we invented it, we seem to be being merely whimsical. Why should anybody take our invention seriously? If truths are merely convenient fictions, what about the truth of the claim that that is what they are? Is that too a convenient fiction? Convenient for what? For whom? I think it is important that we who are accused of relativism stop using the distinctions between finding and making, discovery and invention, objective and subjective. We should not let ourselves be described as subjectivists, and perhaps calling ourselves 'social constructionists' is too misleading. For we cannot formulate our point in terms of a distinction between what is outside us and what is inside us. We must repudiate the vocabulary our opponents use, and not let them impose it upon us. To say that we must repudiate this vocabulary is to say, once again, that we must avoid Platonism and metaphysics, in that wide sense of metaphysics in which Heidegger said that metaphysics is Platonism. (Whitehead was making the same point when he said that all of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Whitehead's point was that we do not call an inquiry 'philosophical' unless it revolves around some of the distinctions which Plato drew.) The distinction between the found and the made is a version of that between the absolute and the relative, between something which is what it is apart from its relations to other things, and something whose nature depends upon those relations. In the course of the centuries, this distinction has become central to what Derrida calls 'the metaphysics of presence' - the search for a 'full presence beyond the reach of play', an absolute beyond the reach of relationality. So if we wish to abandon that metaphysics we must stop distinguishing between the absolute and the relative. We anti-Platonists cannot permit ourselves to be called 'relativists', since that description begs the central question. That central question is about the utility of the vocabulary which we inherited from Plato and Aristotle. Our opponents like to suggest that to abandon that vocabulary is

to abandon rationality - that to be rational consists precisely in respecting the distinctions between the absolute and the relative, the found and the made, object and subject, nature and convention, reality and appearance. We pragmatists reply that ifthat were what rationality was, then no doubt we are, indeed, irrationalists. But of course we go on to add that being an irrationalist in that sense is not to be incapable of argument. We irrationalists do not foam at the mouth and behave like animals. We simply refuse to talk in a certain way, the Platonic way. The views we hope to persuade people to accept cannot be stated in Platonic terminology. So our efforts at persuasion must take the form of gradual inculcation of new ways of speaking, rather than of straightforward argument within old ways of speaking. To sum up what I have said so far: We pragmatists shrug offcharges that we are 'relativists' or 'irrationalists' by saying that these charges presuppose precisely the distinctions we reject. If we have to describe ourselves, perhaps it would be best for us to call ourselves anti-dualists. This does not, of course, mean that we are against what Derrida calls 'binary oppositions': dividing the world up into the good Xs and the bad non-Xs will always be an indispensable tool of inquiry. But we are against a certain specific set of distinctions, the Platonic distinctions. We have to admit that these distinctions have become part of Western common sense, but we do not regard this as a sufficient argument for retaining them. So far I have been speaking of 'we so-called relativists' and of 'we anti-Platonists'. But now I need to become more specific and name names. As I said at the outset, the group of philosophers I have in mind includes a tradition ofpost-Nietzschean European philosophy and also a tradition of post-Darwinian American philosophy, the tradition of pragmatism. The great names of the first tradition include Heidegger, Sartre, Gadamer, Derrida and Foucault. The great names ofthe second tradition includeJames, Dewey, Kuhn, Quine, Putnam and Davidson. All of these philosophers have been fiercely attacked as relativists. Both traditions have attempted to cast doubt on the Kantian and Hegelian distinction between subject and object, on the Cartesian distinctions which Kant and Hegel used to formulate their problematic,

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and on the Greek distinctions which provided the framework for Descartes' own thought. The most important thing that links the great names of each tradition to one other, and thus links the two traditions together, is suspicion of the same set of Greek distinctions, the distinctions which make it possible, natural, and almost inevitable to ask, 'Found or made?', 'Absolute or relative?', 'Real or apparent?' Before saying more about what binds these two traditions together, however, I should say a little about what separates them. Although the European tradition owes a lot to Darwin by way of Nietzsche and Marx, European philosophers have typically distinguished quite sharply between what empirical scientists do and what philosophers do. Philosophers in this tradition often sneer at 'naturalism' and 'empiricism' and 'reductionism'. They sometimes condemn recent Anglophone philosophy without a hearing, because they assume it to be infected by these diseases. The American pragmatist tradition, by contrast, has made a point of breaking down the distinctions between philosophy, science and politics. Its representatives often describe themselves as 'naturalists', though they deny that they are reductionists or empiricists. Their objection to both traditional British empiricism and the scientistic reductionism characteristic of the Vienna Circle is precisely that neither is sufficiendy naturalistic. In my perhaps chauvinistic view, we Americans have been more consistent than the Europeans. For American philosophers have realized that the idea of a distinctive, autonomous, cultural activity called 'philosophy' becomes dubious when the vocabulary which has dominated that activity is called into question. When Platonic dualisms go, the distinction between philosophy and the rest of culture is in danger. Another way ofexhibiting the difference between the two traditions is to say that the Europeans have typically put forward a distinctive, new, post-Nietzschean 'method' for philosophers to employ. Thus in early Heidegger and early Sartre we find talk of 'phenomenological ontology', in late Heidegger of something mysterious and wonderful called 'Thinking', in Gadamer of 'hermeneutics', in Foucault of 'the archaeology of knowledge' and of 'genealogy'. Only Derrida seems free from this temptation; his term 'grammatology' was evanescent

whimsy, rather than a serious attempt to proclaim the discovery of a new philosophical method or strategy. By contrast, the Americans have not been much given to such proclamations. Dewey, it is true, talked a lot about bringing 'scientific method' into philosophy, but he never was able to explain what this method was, nor what it was supposed to add to the virtues ofcuriosity, open-mindedness and conversability. James sometimes spoke of 'the pragmatic method', but this meant litde more than the insistence on pressing the anti-Platonist question, 'Does our purported theoretical difference make any difference to practice?' That insistence was not so much the employment of a method as the assumption of a sceptical attitude towards traditional philosophical problems and vocabularies. Quine, Putnam and Davidson are all labelled 'analytic philosophers', but none of the three thinks of himself as practising a method called 'conceptual analysis', nor any other method. The so-called 'postpositivistic' version of analytic philosophy which these three philosophers have helped to create is notably free ofmethodolatry. The various contemporary contributors to the pragmatist tradition are not much inclined to insist on either the distinctive nature of philosophy or the pre-eminent place of philosophy within culture as a whole. None of them believes that philosophers think, or should think, in ways dramatically different from the ways in which physicists and politicians think. They would all agree with Thomas Kuhn that science, like politics, is problem-solving. So they would be content to describe themselves as s<jving philosophical problems. But the main problem which they want to solve is the origin of the problems which the philosophical problem has bequeathed to us: why, they ask, are the standard, textbook problems of philosophy both so intriguing and barren? Why are philosophers, now as in Cicero's day, still arguing inconclusively, tramping round and round the same dialectical circles, never convincing each other but still able to attract students? This question, the question of the nature of the problems which the Greeks, Descartes, Kant and Hegel have .bequeathed to us, leads us back around to the distinction between finding and making. The philosophical tradition has insisted that these problems are found, in the sense that they are inevitably encountered by any reflective mind.

a Darwinian account of human beings as animals doing their best to cope with the environment - doing their best to develop tools which will enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain. Words are among the tools which these clever animals have developed. There is no way in which tools can take one out of touch with reality. No matter whether the tool is a hammer or a gun or a belief or a statement, tool-using is part of the interaction of the organism with its environment. To see the employment of words as the use of tools to deal with the environment, rather than as an attempt to represent the intrinsic nature of that environment, is to repudiate the question of whether human minds are in touch with reality - the question asked by the epistemological sceptic. No organism, human or non-human, is ever more or less in touch with reality than any other organism. The very idea of 'being out of touch with reality' presupposes the un-Darwinian, Cartesian picture of a mind which somehow swings free of the causal forces exerted on the body. The Cartesian mind is an entity whose relations with the rest of the universe are representational rather than causal. So to rid our thinking of the vestiges of Cartesianism, to become fully Darwinian in our thinking, we need to stop thinking of words as representations and to start thinking of them as nodes in the causal network which binds the organism together with its environment. Seeing language and inquiry in this biologistic way, a way made familiar in recent years by the work of HumbeIio Maturana and others, permits us to discard the picture of the human mind as an interior space within which the human person is located. As the American philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett has argued, it is only this picture of a Cartesian Theatre which makes one think that there is a big philosophical or scientific problem about the nature of the origin of consciousness. We should substitute a picture of an adult human organism as one whose behaviour is so complex that it can be predicted only by attributing intentional states - beliefs and desires - to the organism. On this account, beliefs and desires are not prelinguistic modes of consciousness, which mayor may not be expressible in language. Nor are they names of immaterial events. Rather, they are what in philosophical jargon are called 'sentential attih,ldes' - that is

The pragmatist tradition has insisted that they are made - are artificial rather than natural- and can be unmade by using a different vocabulary than that which the philosophical tradition has used. But such distinctions between the found and the made, the natural and the artificial are, as I have already said, not distinctions with which pragmatists can be comfortable. So it would be better for pragmatists to say simply that the vocabulary in which the traditional problems of Western philosophy were formulated were useful at one time, but are no longer useful. Putting the matter that way would obviate the appearance of saying that whereas the tradition dealt with what was not really there, we pragmatists are dealing with what is really there. Of course we pragmatists cannot say that. For we have no use for the reality-appearance distinction, any more than for the distinction between the found and the made. We hope to replace the realityappearance distinction with the distinction between the more useful and the less useful. So we say that the vocabulary of Greek metaphysics and Christian theology - the vocabulary used in what Heidegger has called 'the onto-theological tradition' - was a useful one for our ancestors' purposes, but that we have different purposes, which will be better served by employing a different vocabulary. Our ancestors climbed up a ladder which we are now in a position to throwaway. We can throw it away not because we have reached a final resting place, but because we have different problems to solve than those which perplexed our ancestors. So far I have been sketching the pragmatists' attitude towards their opponents, and the difficulties they encounter in avoiding the use of terms whose use would beg the question at issue between them and their opponents. Now I should like to describe in somewhat more detail how human inquiry looks from a pragmatist point of view how it looks once one stops describing it as an attempt to correspond to the intrinsic nature of reality, and starts describing it as an attempt to serve transitory purposes and solve transitory problems. Pragmatists hope to break with the picture which, in Wittgenstein's words, 'holds us captive' - the Cartesian-Lockean picture of a mind seeking to get in touch with a reality outside itself. So they start with

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to say, dispositions on the part of organisms, or of computers, to assert or deny certain sentences. To attribute beliefs and desires to non-users oflanguage (such as dogs, infants and thermostats) is, for us pragmatists, to speak metaphorically. Pragmatists complement this biologistic approach with Charles Sanders Peirce's definition of a belief as a habit of action. On this definition, to ascribe a belief to someone is simply to say that he or she will tend to behave as I behave when I am willing affirm the truth of a certain sentence. We ascribe beliefs to things which use, or can be imagined to use, sentences, but not to rocks and plants. This is not because the former have a special organ or capacity - consciousness - which the latter lack, but simply because the habits of action of rocks and plants are sufficiently familiar and simple that their behaviour can be predicted without ascribing sentential attitudes to them. On this view, when we utter such sentences as 'I am hungry' we are not making external what was previously internal, but are simply helping those around to us to predict our future actions. Such sentences are not used to report events going on within the Cartesian Theatre which is a person's consciousness. They are simply tools for coordinating our behaviour with those of others. This is not to say that one can 'reduce' mental states such as beliefs and desires to physiological or behavioural states. It is merely to say that there is no point in asking whether a belief represents reality, either mental reality or physical reality, accurately. That is, for pragmatists, not only a bad question, but the root of much wasted philosophical energy. The right question to ask is, 'For what purposes would it be useful to hold that belief?' This is like the question, 'For what purposes would it be useful to load this program into my computer?' On the Putnamesque view I am suggesting, a person's body is analogous to the computer's hardware, and his or her beliefs and desires are analogous to the software. Nobody knows or cares whether a given piece ofcomputer software represents reality accurately. What we care about is whether it is the software which will most efficiently accomplish a certain task. Analogously, pragmatists think that the question to ask about our beliefs is not whether they are about reality or merely about appearance, but simply whether they are the best habits of action for gratifying our desires.

On this view, to say that a belief is, as far as we know, true, is to say that no alternative belief is, as far as we know, a better habit of acting. When we say that our ancestors believed, falsely, that the sun went around the earth, and that we believe, truly, that the earth goes round the sun, we are saying that we have a better tool than our ancestors did. Our ancestors might rejoin that their tool enabled them to believe in the literal truth of the Christian Scriptures, whereas ours does not. Our reply has to be, I think, that the benefits of modem astronomy and of space travel outweigh the advantages of Christian fundamentalism. The argument between us and our medieval ancestors should not be about which of us has got the universe right. It should be about the point of holding views about the motion of heavenly bodies, the ends to be achieved by the use of certain tools. Confirming the truth of Scripture is one such aim, space travel is another. Another way of making this last point is to say that we pragmatists cannot make sense of the idea that we should pursue truth for its own sake. We cannot regard truth as a goal of inquiry. The purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do, to bring about consensus on the ends to be achievt;d and the means to be used to achieve those ends. Inquiry that does not achieve coordination of behaviour is not inquiry but simply wordplay. To argue for a certain theory about the microstructure of material bodies, or about the proper balance of powers between branches of government, is to argue about what we should do: how we should use the tools at our disposal in order to make technological, or political, progress. So, for pragmatists there is no sharp break between natural science and social science, nor between social science and politics, nor between politics, philosophy and literature. All areas of culture are parts of the same endeavour to make life better. There is no deep split between theory and practice, because on a pragmatist view all so-called 'theory' which is not wordplay is always already practice. To treat beliefs not as representations but as habits of action, and words not as representations but as tools, is to make it pointless to ask, 'Am I discovering or inventing, making or finding?' There is no point in dividing up the organisms' interaction with the environment in this way. Consider an example. We normally say that a bank account is

a social construction rather than an object in the natural world, whereas a giraffe is an object in the natural world rather than a social construction. Bank accounts are made, giraffes are found. Now the truth in this view is simply that if there had been no human beings there would still have been giraffes, whereas there would have been no bank accounts. But this causal independence of giraffes from humans does not mean that giraffes are what they are apart from human needs and interests. On the contrary, we describe giraffes in the way we do, as giraffes, because ofour needs and interests. We speak a language which includes the word 'giraffe' because it suits our purposes to do so. The same goes for words like 'organ', 'cell', 'atom', and so on - the names of the parts out of which giraffes are made, so to speak. All the descriptions we give of things are descriptions suited to our purposes. No sense can be made, we pragmatists argue, of the claim that some of these descriptions pick out 'natural kinds' - that they cut nature at the joints. The line between a giraffe and the surrounding air is clear enough if you are a human being interested in hunting for meat. If you are a language-using ant or amoeba, or a space voyager observing us from far above, that line is not so clear, and it is not clear that you would need or have a word for 'giraffe' in your language. More generally, it is not clear that any of the millions of ways of describing the piece of space time occupied by what we call a giraffe is any closer to the way things are in themselves than any of the others. Just as it seems pointless to ask whether a giraffe is really a collection of atoms, or really a collection of actual and possible sensations in human sense organs, or really something else, so the question, 'Are we describing it as it really is?' seems one we never need to ask. All we need to know is whether some competing description might be more useful for some of our purposes. The relativity ofdescriptions to purposes is the pragmatist's principal argument for his antirepresentational view of knowledge - the view that inquiry aims at utility for us rather than an accurate account of how things are in themselves. Because every belief we have must be fonnulated in some language or other, and because languages are not attempts to copy what is out there, but rather tools for dealing with what is out there, there is no way to divide off'the contribution to our

knowledge made by the object' from 'the contribution to our knowledge made by our subjectivity'. Both the words we use and our willingness to affirm certain sentences using those words and not others are the products of fantastically complex causal connections between human organisms and the rest of the universe. There is no way to divide up this web of causal connections so as to compare the relative amount of subjectivity and of objectivity in a given belief. There is no way, as Wittgenstein has said, to come between language and its object, to divide the giraffe in itself from our ways of talking about giraffes. As Hilary Putnam, the leading contemporary pragmatist, has put it: 'elements of what we call "language" or "mind" penetrate so deeply into reality that the very project of representing ourselves as being "mappers" of something "language-independent" is fatally compromised from the start'. The Platonist dream of perfect knowledge is the dream of stripping ourselves clean of everything that comes from inside us and opening ourselves without reservation to what is outside us. But this distinction between inside and outside, as I have said earlier, is one which cannot be made once we adopt a biologistic view. If the Platonist is going to insist on that distinction, he has got to have an epistemology which does not link up in any interesting way with other disciplines. He will end up with an account of knowledge which turns its back on the rest of science. This amounts to making knowledge into something supernatural, a kind of miracle. The suggestion that everything we say and do and believe is a matter of fulfilling human needs and interests might seem simply a way of fonnulating the secularism of the Enlightenment - a way of saying that human beings are on their own, and have no supernatural light to guide them to the Truth. But of course the Enlightenment replaced the idea of such supernatural guidance with the idea of a quasi-divine faculty called 'reason'. It is this idea which American pragmatists and post-Nietzschean European philosophers are attacking. What seems most shocking about their criticisms of this idea is not their description of natural science as an attempt to manage reality rather than to represent it. Rather, it is their description of moral

choice as always a matter of compromise between competing goods, rather than as a choice between the absolutely right and the absolutely wrong. Controversies between foundationalists and antifoundationalists on the theory of knowledge look like the sort of merely scholastic quarrels which can safely be left to the philosophy professors. But quarrels about the character of moral choice look more important. We stake our sense of who we are on the outcome of such choices. So we do not like to be told that our choices are between alternative goods rather than between good and evil. When philosophy professors start saying that there is nothing either absolutely wrong or absolutely right, the topic of relativism begins to get interesting. The debates between the pragmatists and their opponents, or the Nietzscheans and theirs, begin to look too important to be left to philosophy professors. Everybody wants to get in on the act. This is why philosophers like myself find ourselves denounced in magazines and newspapers which one might have thought oblivious of our existence. These denunciations claim that unless the youth is raised to believe in moral absolutes, and in objective truth, civilization is doomed. Unless the younger generation has the same attachment to firm moral principles as we have, these magazine and newspaper articles say, the struggle for human freedom and human decency will be over. When we philosophy teachers read this sort of article, we find ourselves being told that we have enormous power over the future of mankind. For all it will take to overturn centuries of moral progress, these articles suggest, is a generation which accepts the doctrines of moral relativism, accepts the views common to Nietzsche and Dewey. Dewey and Nietzsche of course disagreed about a lot of things. Nietzsche thought of the happy, prosperous masses who would inhabit Dewey's social democratic utopia as 'the last men', worthless creatures incapable of greatness. Nietzsche was as instinctively antidemocratic in his politics as Dewey was instinctively democratic. But the two men agree not only on the nature of knowledge but on the nature of moral choice. Dewey said that every evil is a rejected good. WilliamJames said that every human need has a prima facie right to be gratified, and the only reason for refusing to gratify it is that it conflicts with

another human need. Nietzsche would have entirely agreed. He would have phrased this point in terms of competition between bearers of the will to power, whereas James and Dewey would have found the term 'power', with its sadistic overtones, a bit misleading. But these three philosophers made identical criticisms of Enlightenment, and specifically Kantian, attempts to view moral principles as the product of a special faculty called 'reason'. They all thought that such attempts were disingenuous attempts to keep something like God alive in the midst of a secular culture. Critics of moral relativism think that unless there is something absolute, something which shares God's implacable refusal to yield to human weakness, we have no reason to go on resisting evil. If evil is merely a lesser good, if all moral choice is a compromise between conflicting goods, then, they say, there is no point in moral struggle. The lives of those who have died resisting injustice become pointless. But to us pragmatists moral struggle is continuous with the struggle for existence, and no sharp break divides the unjust from the imprudent, \. the evil from the inexpedient. What matters for pragmatists is devising ways of diminishing human suffering and increasing human equality, increasing the ability of all human children to start life with an equal chance of happiness. This goal is not written in the stars, and is no more an expression of what Kant called 'pure practical reason' than it is of the Will of God. It is a goal worth dying for, but it does not require backup from supernatural forces. The pragmatist view of what opponents of pragmatism call 'firm moral principles' is that such principles are abbreviations of past practices - way of summing up the habits of the ancestors we most admire. For example, Mill's greater-happiness principle and Kant's categorical imperative are ways of reminding ourselves ofcertain social customs - those of certain parts of the Christian West, the culture which has been, at least in words if not in deeds, more egalitarian than any other. The Christian doctrine that all members of the species are brothers and sisters is the religious way of saying what Mill and Kant said in non-religious terms: that considerations of family membership, sex, race, religious creed and the like should not prevent us from trying to do unto others as we would have them do to us -

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The socially most important provocations will be offered by teachers who make vivid and concrete the failure of the country of which we remain loyal citizens to live up to its own ideals ~ the failure of America to be what it knows it ought to become. This is the traditional function of the reformist liberal left, as opposed to the revolutionary radical left. In recent decades, it has been the main function of American college teachers in the humanities and social sciences. Carrying out this function, however, cannot be made a matter ofexplicit institutional policy. For, if it is being done right, it is too complicated, controversial and tendentious to be the subject ofagreement in a faculty meeting. Nor is it the sort of thing that can be easily explained to the governmental authorities or the trustees who supply the cash. It is a matter that has to be left up to individual college teachers to do or not do as they think fit, as their sense of responsibility to their students and their sotiety inspires them. To say that, whatever their other faults, American colleges and universities remain bastions of academic freedom, is to say that the typical administrator would not dream of trying to interfere with a teacher's attempt to carry out such responsibilities. In short, if the high schools were doing the job that lots of money and determination might make them able to do, the colleges would not have to worry about Great Books, or general education, or overcoming fragmentation. The faculty could just teach whatever seemed good to them to teach, and the administrators could get along nicely without much knowledge of what was being taught. They could rest content with making sure that teachers who want to teach a course that has never been taught before, or assign materials that have never been assigned before, or otherwise break out of the disciplinary matrix that some academic department has been perpetuating are free to do so ~

as well as trying to ensure that teachers who might want to do such things get appointed to the faculty. But, in the real world, the Ig-year-olds arrive at the doors of the colleges not knowing a lot of the words on Hirsch's list. They still have to be taught a lot of memorizable conventional wisdom of the sort that gets dinned into the heads of their co-evals in other countries. So the colleges have to serve as finishing schools, and the administrators sometimes have to dragoon the faculty into helping with this task. As things unfortunately - and with luck only temporarily - are, the colleges have to finish the job of socialization. Worse yet, they have to do this when the students are already too old and too restless to put up with such a process. It would be well for the colleges to remind us that Ig is an age when young people should have finished absorbing the best that has been thought and said and should have started becoming suspicious of it. It would also be well for them to remind us that the remedial work that society currently forces college faculties to undertake - the kind ofwork that Great Books curricula are typically invented in order to carry out - is just an extra chore, analogous to the custodial functions forced upon the high school teachers. Such courses may, of course, be immensely valuable to students - as they were to Allan Bloom and me when we took them at the University of Chicago 40 years ago. Nevertheless, carrying out such remedial tasks is not the social function of colleges and universities. We Deweyans think that the social function of American colleges is to help the students see that the national narrative around which their socialization has centred is an open-ended one. It is to tempt the students to make themselves into people who can stand to their own pasts as Emerson and Anthony, Debs and Baldwin, stood to their pasts. This is done by helping the students realize that, despite the progress that the present has made over the past, the good has once again become the enemy of the better. With a bit of help, the students will start noticing everything that is paltry and mean and unfree in their surroundings. With luck, the best of them will succeed in altering the conventional wisdom, so that the next generation is socialized in a somewhat different way than they themselves were socialized. To hope that this way will only be somewhat different is to hope that the society

will remain reformist and democratic, rather than being convulsed by revolution. To hope that it will nevertheless be perceptibly different is to remind oneself that growth is indeed the only end that democratic higher education can serve and also to remind oneself that the direction of growth is unpredictable. This is why we Deweyans think that, although Hirsch is right in asking, 'What should they know when they come out of high school?' and 'What remedial work remains, things being as they are, for the colleges to do?', the question, 'What should they learn in college?' had better go unasked. Such questions suggest that college faculties are instrumentalities that can be ordered to a purpose. The temptation to suggest this comes over administrators occasionally, as does the feeling that higher education is too important to be left to the professors. From an administrative point of view, the professors often seem self-indulgent and self-obsessed. They look like loose cannons, people whose habit of setting their own agendas needs to be curbed. But administrators sometimes forget that college students badly need to find themselves in a place in which people are not ordered to a purpose, in which loose cannons are free to roll about. The only point in having real live professors around instead of just computer terminals, videotapes and mimeoed lecture notes is that students need to have freedom· enacted before their eyes by actual human beings. That is why tenure and academic freedom are more than just trade union demands. Teachers setting their own agendas - putting their individual, lovingly prepared specialities on display in the curricular cafeteria, without regard to any larger end, much less any institutional plan - is what non-vocational higher education is all about.

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Such enactments offreedom are the principal occasions of the erotic relationships between teacher and student that Socrates and Allan Bloom celebrate and that Plato unfortunately tried to capture in a theory of human nature and of the liberal arts curriculum. But love is notoriously untheorizable. Such erotic relationships are occasions of growth, and their occurrence and their development are as unpredictable as growth itself. Yet nothing important happens in nonvocational higher education without them. Most of these relationships

are with the dead teachers who wrote the books the students are assigned, but some will be with the live teachers who are giving the lectures. In either case, the sparks that leap back and forth between teacher and student, connecting them in a relationship that has little to do with socialization but much to do with self-creation, are the principal means by which the institutions of a liberal society get changed. Unless some such relationships are formed, the students will never realize what democratic institutions are good for: namely, making possible the invention of new forms of human freedom, taking liberties never taken before. I shall end by returning to the conservative-radical contrast with which I began. I have been trying to separate both the conservative's insistence on community and the radical's insistence on individuality from philosophical theories about human nature and about the foundations of democratic society. Platonism and Nietzsche's inversion of Platonism seem to me equally unfruitful in thinking about education. As an alternative, I have offered Dewey's exaltation of democracy for its own sake and of growth for its own sake - an exaltation as fruitful as it is fuzzy. This fuzziness annoys the conservatives because it does not provide enough sense of direction and enough constraints. The same fuzziness annoys the radicals because it provides neither enough fuel for resentment nor enough hope for sudden, revolutionary change. But the fuzziness that Dewey shared with Emerson is emblematic of what Wallace Stevens and Harold Bloom call 'the American Sublime'. That Sublime still lifts up the hearts of some fraction of each generation of college students.

8. The Humanistic Intellectual: Eleven Theses (Ig8g)

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I. We should not try to define 'the humanities' by asking what the humanities departments share which distinguishes them from the rest of the university. The interesting dividing line is, instead, one that cuts across departments and disciplinary matrices. It divides people busy conforming to well-understood criteria for making contributions to knowledge from people trying to expand their own moral imaginations. These latter people read books in order to enlarge their sense of what is possible and important - either for themselves as individuals or for their society. Call these people the 'humanistic intellectuals'. One often finds more such people in the anthropology department than in the classics department, and sometimes more in the law school than in the philosophy department. 2. If one asks what good these people do, what social function they perform neither 'teaching' nor 'research' is a very good answer. Their idea of teaching - or at least of the sort of teaching they hope to do - is not exactly the communication of knowledge, but more like stirring the kids up. When they apply for a leave or a grant, they may have to fill out forms about the aims and methods of their so-called research projects, but all they really want to do is read a lot more books in the hope of becoming a different sort of person. 3. So the real social function of the humanistic intellectuals is to instil doubts in the students about the students' own self-images, and about the society to which they belong. These people are the teachers who help ensure that the moral consciousness of each new generation is slightly different from that of the previous generation. 4. But when it comes to the rhetoric of public support for higher education, we do not talk much about this social function. We cannot

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tell boards of trustees, government commissions, and the like, that our function is to stir things up, to make our society feel guilty, to keep it offbalance. We cannot say that the taxpayers employ us to make sure that their children will think differently than they do. Somewhere deep down, everybody - even the average taxpayer - knows that that is one of the things colleges and universities are for. But nobody can afford to make this fully explicit and public. 5. We humanistic intellectuals find ourselves in a position analogous to that of the 'social-gospel' or 'liberation theology' clergy, the priests and ministers who think of themselves as working to build the kingdom of God on earth. Their opponents describe their activity as leftist political action. The clergy, they say, are being paid to relay God's word, but are instead meddling in politics. Weare accused of being paid to contribute to and communicate knowledge, while instead 'politicizing the humanities' . Yet we cannot take the idea of unpoliticized humanities any more seriously than our opposite numbers in the clergy can take seriously the idea of a depoliticized church. 6. We are still expected to make the ritual noises to which the trustees and the funding agencies are accustomed - noises about 'objective criteria of excellence', 'fundamental moral and spiritual values', 'the enduring questions posed by the human condition', and so on, just as the liberal clergy is supposed to mumble its way through creeds written in an earlier and simpler age. But those of us who have been impressed by the anti-Platonic, antiessentialist, historicizing, naturalizing writers of the last few centuries (people like Hegel, Darwin, Freud, Weber, Dewey and Foucault) must either become cynical or else put our own tortured private constructions on these ritual phrases. 7. This tension between public rhetoric and private sense of mission leaves the academy in general, and the humanistic intellectuals in particular, vulnerable to heresy hunters. Ambitious politicians like William Bennett - or cynical journalists like the young William Buckley (author of God and Man at Yale) or Charles Sykes (author of Prqfscam) can always point out gaps between official rhetoric and actual practice. Usually, however, such heresy hunts peter out quickly in the face of faculty solidarity. The professors of physics and law, people whom

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nobody wants to mess with, can be relied upon to rally around fellow members of the American Association of University Professors who teach anthropology or French, even if they neither know nor care what the latter do. 8. In the current flap about the humanities, however, the heresy hunters have a more vulnerable target than usual. This target is what Allan Bloom calls 'the Nietzscheanized left'. This left is an anomaly in America. In the past the American left has asked our country to be true to its ideals, to go still further along the path of expanding human freedom which our forefathers mapped: the path which led us from the abolition of slavery through women's suffrage, the Wagner Act and the Civil Rights Movement, to contemporary feminism and gay liberation. But the Nietzscheanized left tells the country it is rotten to the core - that it is a racist, sexist, imperialist society, one which can't be trusted an inch, one whose every utterance must be ruthlessly deconstructed. 9. Another reason this left is a vulnerable target is that it is extraordinarily self-obsessed and ingrown, as well as absurdly overphilosophized. It takes seriously Paul de Man's weird suggestion that 'one can approach the problems of ideology and by extension the problems of politics only on the basis of critical-linguistic analysis'. It seems to accept Hillis Miller's fantastic claim that 'the millennium [of universal peace and justice among men] would come if all men and women became good readers in de Man's sense'. When asked for a utopian sketch of our country's future, the new leftists reply along the lines of one of Foucault's most fatuous remarks. When asked why he never sketched a utopia, Foucault said, 'I think that to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system.' De Man and Foucault were (and Miller is) a lot better than these unfortunate remarks would suggest, but some of their followers are a lot worse. This over-philosophized and self-obsessed left is the mirror image of the over-philosophized and self-obsessed Straussians. The contempt of both groups for contemporary American society is so great that both have rendered themselves impotent when it comes to national, state or local politics. This means that they get to spend all their energy on academic politics.

10. The two groups are currently staging a sham battle about how to construct reading lists. The Straussians say that the criterion for what books to assign is intrinsic excellence, and the Nietzscheanized left says that it is fairness - e.g., fairness to females, blacks and Third Worlders. They are both wrong. Reading lists should be constructed so as to preserve a delicate balance between two needs. The first is the need of the students to have common reference points with people in previous generations and in other social classes - so that grandparents and grandchildren, people who went to the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater and people who went to Stanford, will have read a lot of the same books. The second is the need of the teachers to be able to teach the books which have moved them, excited them, changed their lives - rather than having to teach a syllabus handed down by a committee. II. Philosophers of education, well-intended committees and governmental agencies have attempted to understand, define and manage the humanities. The point, however, is to keep the humanities changing fast enough so that they remain indefinable and unmanageable. All we need to keep them changing that fast is good old-fashioned academic freedom. Given freedom to shrug off the heresy hunters and their cries of 'politicization!', as well as freedom for each new batch of assistant professors to despise and repudiate the departmental Old Guard to whom they owe their jobs, the humanities will continue to be in good shape. If you don't like the ideological weather in the local English department these days, wait a generation. Watch what happens to the Nietzscheanized left when it tries to replace itself, around about the year 2010. I'm willing to bet that the brightest new Ph.D.s in English that year will be people who never want to hear the terms 'binary opposition' or 'hegemonic discourse' again as long as they live.

9· The Pragmatist's Progress: Umberto Eco on Interpretation (199 2 )

When I read Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, I decided that Eco must be satirizing the way in which scientists, scholars, critics and philosophers think of themselves as cracking codes, peeling away accidents to reveal essence, stripping away veils of appearance to reveal reality. I read the novel as antiessentialist polemic, as a spoof of the metaphor of depth - of the notion that there are deep meanings hidden from the vulgar, meanings which only those lucky enough to have cracked a very difficult code can know. I took it as pointing up the similarities between Robert Budd and Aristotle - or, more generally, between the books you find in the 'Occult' sections of bookstores and the ones you find in the 'Philosophy' sections. More specifically, I interpreted the novel as a send-up of structuralism - of the very idea of structures which stand to texts or cultures as skeletons to bodies, programs to computers, or keys to locks. Having previously read Eco's A Theory qf Semiotics - a book which sometimes reads like an attempt to crack the code of codes, to reveal the universal structure of structures - I concluded that Foucault's Pendulum stood to that earlier book as Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I decided that Eco had managed to shrug off the diagrams and taxonomies of his earlier work, just as the older Wittgenstein shrugged off his youthful fantasies of ineffable objects and rigid connections. I found my interpretation confirmed in the last 50 pages of the novel. At the beginning of those pages we find ourselves caught up in what purports to be an axial moment of history. This is the moment in which the hero, Casaubon, sees all the earth's seekers after the One True Meaning of Things assembled at what they believe to be the

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World's Navel. The Cabbalists, the Templars, the Masons, the Pyramidologists, the Rosicrucians, the Voodooists, the emissaries from the Central Ohio Temple of the Black Pentacle - they are all there, whirling around Foucault's pendulum, a pendulum which is now weighted with the corpse of Casaubon's friend Belbo. From this climax the novel slowly spirals down to a scene .of Casaubon alone in a pastoral landscape, an Italian hillside. He is in a mood of wry abjuration, relishing small sensory pleasures, cherishing images of his infant child. A few paragraphs from the very end of the book, Casaubon meditates as follows: Along the Bricco's slopes are rows and rows of vines. I know them, I have seen similar rows in my day. No doctrine of numbers can say if they are in ascending or descending order. In the midst of the rows - but you have to walk barefoot, with your heels callused, from childhood - there are peach trees ... When you eat the peach, the velvet of the skin makes shudders run from your tongue to your groin. Dinosaurs once grazed there. Then another surface covered theirs. And yet, like Belbo when he played the trumpet, when I bit into the peach I understood the Kingdom and was one with it. The rest is only cleverness. Invent; invent the Plan, Casaubon. That's what everyone has done, to explain the dinosaurs and the peaches. I read this passage as describing a moment like that when Prospero breaks his staff, or when Faust listens to Ariel and abandons the quest of part I for the ironies of part II. It reminded me of the moment when Wittgenstein realized that the important thing is to be able to stop doing philosophy when one wants to, and of the moment when Heidegger concluded that he must overcome all overcoming and leave metaphysics to itself. By reading the passage in terms of these parallels, I was able to call up a vision of the great magus of Bologna renouncing structuralism and abjuring taxonomy. Eco, I decided, is telling us that he is now able to enjoy dinosaurs, peaches, babies, symbols and metaphors without needing to cut into their smooth flanks in search of hidden armatures. He is willing at last to abandon his long search for the Plan, for the code of codes.

By interpreting Foucault's Pendulum in this way I was doing the same sort ofthing as is done by all those monomaniacal sectarian taxonomists who whirl round the pendulum. These people eagerly fit anything that comes along into the secret history of the Templars, or the ladder of Masonic enlightenment, or the plan of the Great Pyramid, or whatever their particular obsession happens to be. Shudders run from their cerebral cortices to their groins as they share the delights which Paracelsus and Fludd knew - as they discover the true significance of the fuzziness of peaches, seeing this microcosmic fact as corresponding to some macrocosmic principle. Such people take exquisite pleasure in finding that their key has opened yet another lock, that still another coded message has yielded to their insinuations and given up its secrets. My own equivalent of the secret history of the Templars - the grid which I impose on any book I come across - is a semiautobiographical narrative of the Pragmatist's Progress. At the beginning of this particular quest romance, it dawns on the Seeker after Enlightenment that all the great dualisms of Western philosophy - reality and appearance, pure radiance and diffuse reflection, mind and body, intellectual rigour and sensual sloppiness, orderly semiotics and rambling semiosis - can be dispensed with. They are not to be synthesized into higher unities, not aujgehoben, but rather actively forgotten. An early stage of Enlightenment comes when one reads Nietzsche and begins thinking of all these dualisms as just so many metaphors for the contrast between an imagined state of total power, mastery and control and one's own present impotence. A further state is reached when, upon rereading 7hus Spake Zarathustra, one comes down with the giggles. At that point, with a bit of help from Freud, one begins to hear talk about the Will to Power as just a high-falutin euphemism for the male's hope of bullying the females into submission, or the child's hope of getting back at Mummy and Daddy. The final stage of the Pragmatist's Progress comes when one begins to see one's previous peripeties not as stages in the ascent toward Enlightenment, but simply as the contingent results of encounters with various books which happened to fall into one's hands. This stage is pretty hard to reach, for one is always being distracted by daydreams: daydreams in which the heroic pragmatist plays a Walter Mitty-like

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role in the immanent teleology of world history. But if the pragmatist can escape from such daydreams, he or she will eventually come to think of himself or herself as, like everything else, capable of as many descriptions as there are purposes to be served. There are as many descriptions as there are uses to which the pragmatist might be put, by his or her self or by others. This is the stage in which all descriptions (including one's self-description as a pragmatist) are evaluated according to their efficacy as instruments for purposes, rather than by their fidelity to the object described. So much for the Pragmatist's Progress - a narrative I often use for purposes of self-dramatization, and one into which I was channed to find myself being able to fit Professor Eco. Doing so enabled me to see both of us as having overcome our earlier ambitions to be code-crackers. This ambition led me to waste my 27th and 28th years trying to discover the secret of Charles Sanders Peirce's esoteric doctrine of 'the reality of Thirdness' and thus of his fantastically elaborate semiotico-metaphysical 'System'. I imagined that a similar urge must have led the young Eco to the study of that infuriating philosopher, and that a similar reaction must have enabled him to see Peirce as just one more whacked-out triadomaniac. In short, by using this narrative as a grid, I was able to think ofEco as a fellow pragmatist. This agreeable sense of camaraderie began to evaporate, however, when I read Eco's article 'Intentio lectoris'.1 For in that article, written at roughly the same time as Foucault's Pendulum, he insists upon a distinction between interpreting texts and using texts. This, of course, is a distinction we pragmatists do not wish to make. On our view, all anybody ever does with anything is use it. 2 Interpreting something, knowing it, penetrating to its essence, and so on, are all just various ways of describing some process of putting it to work. So I was abashed to realize that Eco would probably view my reading of his novel as a use rather than an interpretation, and that he did not think much of non-interpretative uses of texts. I was dismayed to find him insisting on a distinction similar to E. D. Hirsch's distinction between meaning and significance - a distinction between getting inside the text itself and relating the text to something else. This is exactly the sort of distinction antiessentialists like me deplore ,- a distinction between inside and

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outside, between the nonrelational and the relational features of something. For, on our view, there is no such thing as an intrinsic, nonrelational property. So I shall focus on Eco's use-interpretation distinction, and do my best to minimize its importance. I begin with one of Eco's own polemical applications of this distinction - his account in 'Intentio lectoris', of how Marie Bonaparte spoiled her own trea~ent of Poe. Eco says that when Bonaparte detected 'the same underlying fabula' in 'Morella', 'Ligeia' and 'Eleonora', she was 'revealing the intentio operis'. But, he continues, 'Unfortunately, such a beautiful textual analysis is interwoven with biographical remarks that connect textual evidence with aspects (known by extratextual sources) of Poe's private life.' When Bonaparte invokes the biographical fact that Poe was morbidly attracted by women with funereal features, then, Eco says, 'she is using and not interpreting texts'. My first attempt to blur this distinction consists in noting that the boundary between one text and another is not so clear. Eco seems to think that it was all right for Bonaparte to read 'Morella' in the light of 'Ligeia'. But why? Merely because of the fact that they were written by the same man? Is that not being unfaithful to 'Morella', and running the danger of confusing the intentio operis with an intentio auctoris inferred from Poe's habit of writing a certain sort of text? Is it fair for me to read Foucault's Pendulum in the light of A Theory if Semiotics and Semantics and the Philosophy if Ltmguage? Or should I, if I want to interpret the first of these books, try to bracket my knowledge that it was written by the author of the other two? If it is all right for me to invoke this knowledge about authorship, how about the next step? Is it all right for me to bring in my knowledge of what it is like to study Peirce - of what it is like to watch the hearty pragmatist of the 1870S transmogrify into the frenzied constructor of existential graphs of the 18gos? Can I fairly use my biographical knowledge ofEco, my knowledge that he spent a lot of time on Peirce, to help explain his having written a novel about occultist monomania? These rhetorical questions are the initial softening-up moves I would make in order to begin to blur Eco's use-interpretation distinction. But the big push comes when I ask why he wants to make a great big

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distinction between the text and the reader, between intentio operis and intentio lectoris. What purpose is served by doing so? Presumably Eco's answer is that it helps you respect the distinction between what he calls 'internal textual coherence' and what he calls 'the uncontrollable drives of the reader'. He says that the latter 'controls' the former, and that the only way to check a conjecture against the intentio operis 'is to check it against the text as a coherent whole'. So presumably we erect the distinction as a barrier to our monomaniacal desire to subsume everything to our own needs. One of those needs, however, is to convince other people that we are right. So we pragmatists can view the imperative to check your interpretation against the text as a coherent whole simply as a reminder that, ifyou want to make your interpretation ofa book sound plausible, you cannot just gloss one or two lines or scenes. You have to say something about what most of the other lines or scenes are doing there. If I wanted to persuade you to accept my interpretation of Foucault's Pendulum, I should have to account for the 39 pages which intervene between the climactic Walpurgisnacht scene in Paris and the peaches and dinosaurs ofItaly. I should have to offer a detailed account of the role of the recurrent flashbacks to partisan activities during the Nazi occupation. I should have to explain why, after the moment of abjuration, the last paragraphs of the book introduce a threatening note. For Casaubon ends his pastoral idyll by foreseeing his imminent death at the hands of the pursuing monomaniacs. I do not know whether I could do all this. It is possible that, given three months ofleisure and a modest foundation grant, I might produce a graph which connected all or most of these and other dots, a graph which still profiled Eco as a fellow pragmatist. It is also possible that I would fail, and would have to admit that Eco had other fish than mine to fry, that my own monomania was not flexible enough to accommodate his interests. Whatever the outcome, I agree with Eco that such a graph would be needed before you could decide whether my interpretation of Foucault's Pendulum was worth taking seriously. But given this distinction between a first blush, brute force, unconvincing application of a particular reader's obsession to a text and the product of a three-month-Iong attempt to make that application subde

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and convincing, do we need to describe it in terms of 'the text's intention'? Eco makes clear that he is not claiming that that intention can narrow interpretations down to a single correct one. He happily admits that we can 'show how Joyce [in UlYsses] acted in order to create many alternative figures in the carpet, without deciding how many they can be and which of them are the best ones'. So he thinks of the intention of the text rather as the production of a Model Reader, including 'a Model Reader entided to try infinite conjectures'. What I do not understand in Eco's account is his view of the relation between those latter conjectures and the intention of the text. If the text of UlYsses has succeeded in getting me to envisage a plurality of figures to be found in the carpet, has its internal coherence done all the controlling it can do? Or can it also control the responses of those who wonder whether some given figure is really in the carpet or not? Can it help them choose between competing suggestions - help separate the best interpretation from its competitors? Are its powers exhausted after it has rejected those competitors which are simply unable to connect enough dots - unable to answer enough questions about the function of various lines and scenes? Or does the text have powers in reserve which enable it to say things like 'that graph does, indeed, connect most of my points, but it nevertheless gets me all wrong'? My disinclination to admit that any text can say such a thing is reinforced by the following passage in Eco's article. He says that 'the text is an object that the interpretation builds up in the course of the circular effort of validating itself on the basis of what it makes up as its result' . We pragmatists relish this way of blurring the distinction between finding an object and making it. We like Eco's redescription of what he calls 'the old and still valid hermeneutic circle'. But, given this picture of texts being made as they are interpreted, I do not see any way to preserve the metaphor of a text's internal coherence. I should think that a text just has whatever coherence it happened to acquire during the last roll of the hermeneutic wheel, just as a lump of clay only has whatever coherence it happened to pick up at the last tum of the potter's wheel. So I should prefer to say that the coherence of the text is not

something it has before it is described, any more than the dots had coherence before we connected them. Its coherence is no more than the fact that somebody has found something interesting to say about a group of marks or noises - some way of describing those marks and noises which relates them to some of the other things we are interested in talking about. (For example, we may describe a given set of marks as words of the English language, as very hard to read, as a Joyce manuscript, as worth a million dollars, as an early version of Ulysses, and so on.) This coherence is neither internal nor external to anything; it is just a function of what has been said so far about those marks. As we move from relatively uncontroversial philology and book chat into relatively controversial literary history and literary criticism, what we say must have some reasonably systematic inferential connections with what we or others have previously said - with previous descriptions of these same marks. But there is no point at which we can draw a line between what we are talking about and what we are saying about it, except by reference to some particular purposes, some particular intentio which we happen, at the moment, to have. These, then, are the considerations I should bring to bear against Eco's use-interpretation distinction. Let me now tum to a more general difficulty I have with his work. When I read Eco or any other writer on language, I naturally do so in the light of my own favourite philosophy oflanguage - Donald Davidson's radically naturalistic and holistic view. So my first question, on reading Eco's 1984 book Semiotics and the Philosophy ifLanguage (immediately after reading Foucault's Pendulum) was: How close is Eco going to come to Davidsonian truth? Davidson follows through on Quine's denial of an interesting philosophical distinction between language and fact, between signs and non-signs. I hoped that my interpretation of Foucault's Pendulum my reading of it as what Daniel Dennett calls 'a cure for the common code' - might be confirmed, despite the disconfirmation I had found in 'Intentio lectoris'. For I hoped that Eco would show himself at least somewhat less attached to the notion of'code' than he had been when, in the early 1970s, he wrote A Theory if Semiotics. My hopes were raised by some passages in Semiotics and the Philosophy if Language and cast down by others. On the one hand, Eco's suggestion that we think

about semiotics in terms of labyrinthine inferential relations within an encyclopedia, rather than in terms of dictionary-like relations of equivalence between sign and thing signified, seemed to me to be pointing in the right holistic, Davidsonian direction. So did his Quinean remarks that a dictionary is just a disguised encyclopedia, and that 'any encyclopedia-like semantics must blur the distinction between analytic and synthetic properties'. 3 On the other hand, I was troubled by Eco's quasi-Diltheyan insistence on distinguishing the 'semiotic' from the 'scientific', and on distinguishing philosophy from science4 - an un-Quinean, unDavidsonian thing to do. Further, Eco always seemed to be taking for granted that signs and texts were quite different from other objects objects such as rocks and trees and quarks. At one point he writes: The universe of semiosis, that is, the universe of human culture, must be conceived as structured like a labyrinth of the third type: (a) it is structured according to a network if interpretants. (b) It is virtually infinite because it takes into account multiple interpretations realized by different cultures . . . it is infinite because every discourse about the encyclopedia casts in doubt the previous structure of the encyclopedia itself. (c) It does hot register only 'truths' but, rather, what has been said about the truth or what has been believed to be true ... 5 This description of ' the universe of semios is ... the universe of human culture' seems to be a good description of the universe tout court. As I see it, the rocks and the quarks are just more grist for the hermeneutic process of making objects by talking about them. Granted, one of the things we say when we talk about rocks and quarks is that they antedate us, but we often say that about marks on paper as well. So 'making' is not the right word either for rocks or for marks, any more than is 'finding'. We don't exactly make them, nor do we exactly find them. What we do is to react to stimuli by emitting sentences containing marks and noises such as 'rock', 'quark', 'mark', 'noise', 'sentence', 'text', 'metaphor' and so on. We then infer other sentences from these, and others from those, and so on - building up a potentially infinite labyrinthine encyclopedia

ofassertions. These assertions are always at the mercy ofbeing changed by fresh stimuli, but they are never capable of being ch£cked aga~nst those stimuli, much less against the internal coherence of somethmg outside the encyclopedia. The encyclopedia can get changed by things outside itself, but it can only be ch£ckedby having bits of itself compared with other bits. You cannot check a sentence against an object, although an object can cause you to stop asserting a sentence. You can only check a sentence against other sentences, sentences to which it is connected by various labyrinthine inferential relationships. This refusal to draw a philosophically interesting line between nature and culture, language and fact, the universe of semiosis and some other universe, is where you wind up when, with Dewey and Davidson, you stop thinking of knowledge as accurate representation, of getting the signs lined up in the right relations to the non-signs. For you also stop thinking that you can separate the object from what you say about it, the signified from the sign, or the language from the metalanguage, except ad hoc, in aid of some particular purpose. What Eco says about the hermeneutic circle encourages me to think that he might be more sympathetic to this claim than his essentialist-sounding distinction between interpretation and use would at first suggest. These passages encourage me to think that Eco might someday be willing to join Stanley Fish andJeffrey Stout in offering a thoroughlY pragmatic account of interpretation, one which no longer contrasts interpretation with use. Another aspect ofEco's thought which encourages me to think this is what he says about deconstructive literary criticism. For, many of the things which Eco says about this kind of criticism parallel what we Davidsonians and Fishians say about it. In the final paragraphs of 'Intentio lectoris' Eco says that 'many of the examples ofdeconstruction provided by Derrida' are 'pretextual readings, performed not in order to interpret the text but to show how much language can produce unlimited semiosis'. I think this is right, and that Eco is also right when he goes on to say: It so happened that a legitimate philosophical practice has been taken as a model for literary criticism and for a new trend in

textual interpretation ... It is our theoretical duty to acknowledge that this happened and to show why it should not have happened. 6 Any explanation of why this unfortunate thing happened would bring us back, sooner or later, to the work and influence of Paul de Man. I agree with Professor Kermode that Derrida and de Man are the two men who 'give genuine prestige to theory'. But I think it important to emphasize that there is a crucial difference between the two men's theoretical outlooks. Derrida, on my reading, never takes philosophy as seriously as de Man does, nor does he wish to divide language, as de Man did, into the kind called 'literary' and some other kind. In particular, Derrida never takes the metaphysical distinction between what Eco calls 'the universe of semiosis' and some other universe between culture and nature - as seriously as de Man did. De Man makes heavy use of the standard Diltheyan distinction between 'intentional objects' and 'natural objects'. He insists on contrasting language and its imminent threat of incoherence, produced by 'universal semiosis', with the putatively coherent and unthreatened rocks and quarks. 7 Derrida, like Davidson, edges away from these distinctions, viewing them as just more remnants of the Western metaphysical tradition. De Man, on the other hand, makes them basic to his account of reading. We pragmatists wish that de Man had not sounded this Diltheyan note, and that he had not suggested that there is an area ofculture called 'philosophy' which can lay down guidelines for literary interpretation. More particularly, we wish he had not encouraged the idea that you could, by following these guidelines, find out what a text is 'really about'. We wish that he had dropped the idea that there is a special kind oflanguage called 'literary language' which reveals what language itself 'really is'. For the prevalence of such ideas seems to me largely responsible for the unfortunate idea that reading Derrida on metaphysics will give you what Eco calls 'a model for literary criticism'. De Man offered aid and comfort to the unfortunate idea that there is something useful called the 'deconstructive method'. For us pragmatists, the notion that there is something a given text

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is reallY about, something which rigorous application of a method will reveal, is as bad as the Aristotelian idea that there is something which a substance really, intrinsically, is as opposed to what it only apparently or accidentally or relationally is. The thought that a commentator has discovered what a text is really doing - for example, that it is reallY demystifYing an ideological construct, or reallY de constructing the hierarchical oppositions of Western metaphysics, rather than merely being capable of being used for these purposes - is, for us pragmatists, just more occultism. It is one more claim to have cracked the code, and thereby detected What Is ReallY Going On - one more instance of what I read Eco as satirizing in Foucault's Pendulum. But opposition to the idea that texts are really about something in particular is also opposition to the idea that one particular interpretation might, presumably because of its respect for 'the internal coherence of the text', hit upon what that something is. More generally, it is opposition to the idea that the text can tell you something about what it wants, rather than simply providing stimuli which make it relatively hard or relatively easy to convince yourself or others of what you were initially inclined to say about it. So I am distressed to find Eco quoting Hillis Miller with approval when Miller says: 'the readings of deconstructive criticism are not the wilful imposition by a subjectivity of a theory on the texts, but are coerced by the texts themselves'. 8 To my ear, this is like saying that my use of a screwdriver to drive screws is 'coerced by the screwdriver itself', whereas my use of it to pry open cardboard packages is 'wilful imposition by subjectivity'. A deconstructor like Miller, I should have thought, is no more entitled to invoke this subjectivity-objectivity distinction than are pragmatists like Fish, Stout and myself. People who take the hermeneutic circle as seriously as Eco does should, it seems to me, also eschew it. To enlarge on this point, let me drop the screwdriver and use a better example. The trouble with screwdrivers as an example is that nobody talks about 'finding out how they work', whereas both Eco and Miller talk this way about texts. So let me instead use the example of a computer program. IfI use a particular word-processing program for writing essays, nobody will say that I am wilfully imposing my subjectivity. But the outraged author of that program might conceiv-

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ably say this if she finds me using it to make out my income tax return, a purpose for which that particular program was never intended and for which it is ill-suited. The author might want to back her point up by enlarging on how her program works, going into detail about the various subroutines which make it up, their marvellous internal coherence and their utter unsuitability for purposes of tabulation and calculation. Still, it would be odd of the programmer to do this. To get her point, I do not need to know about the cleverness with which she designed the various subroutines, much less about how they look in BASIC or in some other compiler language. All she really needs to do is to point out that I can get the sort of tabulations and computations I need for the tax return out of her program only through an extraordinarily inelegant and tedious set of manoeuvres, manoeuvres I could avoid if I were only willing to use the right tool for the right purpose. This example helps me to make the same criticism of Eco on the one hand and of Miller and de Man on the other. For the moral of the example is that you should not seek more precision or generality than you need for the particular purpose at hand. I see the idea that you can learn about 'how the text works' by using semiotics to analyse its operation as like spelling out certain word-processing subroutines in BASIC: you can do it if you want to, but it is not clear why, for most of the purposes which motivate literary critics, you should bother. I see the idea that what de Man calls 'literary language' has as its function the dissolution of the traditional metaphysical oppositions, and that reading as such has something to with hastening this dissolution, as analogous to the claim that a quantum-mechanical description of what goes on inside your computer will help you understand the nature of programs in general. In other words, I distrust both the- structuralist idea that knowing more about 'textual mechanisms' is essential for literary criticism and the post-structuralist idea that detecting the presence, or the subversion, of metaphysical hierarchies is essential. Knowing about mechanisms of textual production or about metaphysics can, to be sure, sometimes be useful. Having read Eco, or having read Derrida, will often give you something interesting to say about a text which you could not otherwise have said. But it brings you no closer to what is reallY going

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on in the text than having read Marx, Freud, Matthew Arnold or F. R. Leavis. Each of these supplementary readings simply gives you one more context in which you can place the text - one more grid you can place on top of it or one more paradigm to which to juxtapose it. Neither piece of knowledge tells you anything about the nature of texts or the nature of reading. For neither has a nature. Reading texts is a matter of reading them in the light of other texts, people, obsessions, bits of information, or what have you, and then seeing what happens. What happens may be something too weird and idiosyncratic to bother with - as is probably the case with my reading of Foucault's Pendulum. Or it may be exciting and convincing, as when Derrida juxtaposes Freud and Heidegger, or when Kermode juxtaposes Empson and Heidegger. It may be so exciting and convincing that one has the illusion that one now sees what a certain text is realfy about. But what excites and convinces is a function of the needs and purposes of those who are being excited and convinced. So it seems to me simpler to scrap the distinction between using and interpreting, and just distinguish between uses by different people for different purposes. I think that resistance to this suggestion (which has been made most persuasively by Fish) has two sources. One is the philosophical tradition, going back to Aristotle, which says that there is a big difference between practical deliberation about what to do and attempts to discover the truth. This tradition is invoked when Bernard Williams says, in criticism ofDavidson and me: 'There is clearly such a thing as practical reasoning or deliberation, which is not the same as thinking about how things are. It is obviousfy not the same ... '9 The second source is the set of intuitions which Kant marshalled when he distinguished between value and dignity. Things, Kant said, have value, but persons have dignity. Texts are, for this purpose, honorary persons. To merely use them - to treat them merely as means and not also as ends in themselves - is to act immorally. I have inveighed elsewhere against the Aristotelian practice-theory and the Kantian prudence-morality distinctions, and I shall try not to repeat myself here. Instead, I want briefly to say what can be salvaged from both distinctions. For there is, I think, a useful distinction which is vaguely shadowed forth by these two useless

distinctions. This is between knowing what you want to get out of a person or thing or text in advance and hoping that the person or thing or text will help you want something different - that he or she or it will help you to change your purposes, and thus to change your life. This distinction, I think, helps us highlight the difference between methodical and inspired readings of texts. Methodical readings are typically produced by those who lack what Kermode, following Valery, calls 'an appetite for poetry'.10 They are the sort of thing you get, for example, in an anthology of readings on Conrad's Heart if Darkness which I recently slogged through - one psychoanalytic reading, one reader-response reading, one feminist reading, one deconstructionist reading, and one new historicist reading. None of the readers had, as far as I could see, been enraptured or destabilized by Heart if Darkness. I got no sense that the book had made a big difference to them, that they cared much about Kurtz or Marlow or the woman 'with helmeted head and tawny cheeks' whom Marlow sees on the bank of the river. These people, and that book, had no more changed these readers' purposes than the specimen under the microscope changes the purpose of the histologist. Unmethodical criticism of the sort which one occasionally wants to call 'inspired' is the result of an encounter with an author, character, plot, stanza, line or archaic torso which has made a difference to the critic's conception of who she is, what she is good for, what she wants to do with herself: an encounter which has rearranged her priorities and purposes. Such criticism uses the author or text not as a specimen reiterating a type but as an occasion for changing a previously accepted taxonomy, or for putting a new twist on a previously told story. Its respect for the author or the text is not a matter of respect for an intentio or for an internal structure. Indeed, 'respect' is the wrong word. 'Love' or 'hate' would be better. For a great love or a great loathing is the sort of thing that changes us by changing our purposes, changing the uses to which we shall put people and things and texts we encounter later. Love and loathing are both quite different from the jovial camaraderie which I imagined myself sharing with Eco when I treated Foucault's Pendulum as grist for my pragmatic mill - as a splendid specimen of a recognizable, greetable type.

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It may seem that in saying all this I am taking the side of so-called 'traditional humanistic criticism' against the genre for which, as Professor Culler has said, the most convenient designation is the nickname 'theory' .11 Although I think that this sort of criticism has been treated rather too harshly lately, this is not my intention. For in the first place, a lot of humanistic criticism was essentialist - it believed that there were deep pennanent things embedded in human nature for literature to dig up and exhibit to us. This is not the sort of belief we pragmatists wish to encourage. In the second place, the genre we call 'theory' has done the English-speaking world a lot of good by providing an occasion for us to read a lot of first-rate books we might otherwise have missed - books by Heidegger and Derrida, for example. What 'theory' has not done, I think, is to provide a method for reading, or what Hillis Miller calls 'an ethic of reading'. We pragmatists think that nobody will ever succeed in doing either. We betray what Heidegger and Derrida were trying to tell us when we try to do either. We start succumbing to the old occultist urge to crack codes, to distinguish between reality and appearance, to make an invidious distinction between getting it right and making it useful.

* * * * NOTES 1 Umberto Eco, 'Intentio lectoris: the state of the art', Differentia (1988), voL 2, pp. 147-68. 2. For a nice succinct statement of this pragmatist view of interpretation, see Jeffrey Stout, 'What is the meaning of a text?', New literary History (1982), vol. 14, pp. 1-12. 3. Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy qf Language (1986), p. 73. 4. Eco, Semiotics, p. 10. 5. Eco, Semiotics, pp. 83-4· 6. Eco, 'Intentio lectoris', p. 166. ,. See Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (2nd edition, 1983), p. 24, for de Man's straightforwardly Husserlian way of distinguishing between 'natural objects'

and 'intentional objects'. This is an opposition which Derrida would hardly wish to leave unquestioned. See also de Man, The Resistance to Theory (19 86), p. II, where de Man opposes 'language' to 'the Phenomenal world', as well as Blindness, p. IIO, where he opposes 'scientific' texts to 'critical' texts. 8.]. Hillis Miller, 'Theory and practice', Critical Inquiry (1980), voL 6, p. 6II, quoted in Eco, 'Intentio lectoris', p. 163. 9· Bernard Williams, Ethics and the limits qf Philosop~ (198S), p. 13S. 10. See Frank Kermode, An Appetitefor Poetry (1989), pp. 26-7. II. See Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (19 88 ), p. IS·

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Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility and Romance

In thinking about William James, it helps to remember thatJames not only dedicated Pragmatism to John Stuart Mill, but reiterated some of Mill's most controversial claims. In 'The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life',James says that 'The only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is desired.'l This echo of the most ridiculed sentence in Mill's Utilitarianism is, I suspect, deliberate. One of James's most heartfelt convictions was that to know whether a claim should be met, we need onlY ask which other claims - 'claims actually made by some concrete person' - it runs athwart. We need not also ask whether it is a 'valid' claim. He deplored the fact that philosophers still followed Kant rather than Mill, still thought of validity as raining down upon a claim 'from some sublime dimension of being, which the moral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle the influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens'.2 The view that there is no source of obligation save the claims ofindividual sentient beings entails that we have no responsibility to anything other than such beings. Most of the relevant sentient individuals are our fellow humans. So talk about our responsibility to Truth, or to Reason, must be replaced by talk about our responsibility to our fellow human beings. James's account of truth and knowledge is a utilitarian ethics of belief, designed to facilitate such replacement. Its point of departure is Peirce's treatment ofa beliefas a habit ofaction, rather than as a representation. A utilitarian philosophy of religion must treat being religious as a habit of action. So its principal concern must be the extent to which the actions of religious believers frustrate the needs of other human beings, rather than the extent to which religion gets something right.

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Our responsibility to Truth is not, for James, a responsibility to get things right. Rather, it is a responsibility to ourselves to make our beliefs cohere with one another, and to our fellow humans to make them cohere with theirs. As in Habermas's account of 'communicative rationality' , our obligation to be rational is exhausted by our obligation to take account of other people's doubts and objections to our beliefs. 3 This view of rationality makes it natural to say, as James does, that the true is 'what would be better for us to believe'.4 But of course what is good for one person or group to believe will not be good for another person or group. James never was sure how to avoid the counterintuitive consequence that what is true for one person or group may not be true for another. He fluctuated between Peirce's identification of truth with what will be believed under ideal conditions, and Dewey's strategy of avoiding the topic of truth and talking instead about justification. But for my present purpose evaluating James's argument in 'The Will to Believe' - it is not necessary to decide between these strategies. 5 For that purpose, I can duck questions about what pragmatists should say about truth. I need consider only the question of whether the religious believer has a right to her faith - whether this faith conflicts with her intellectual responsibilities. It is a consequence of James's utilitarian view of the nature of obligation that the obligation to justify one's beliefs arises onlY when one's habits qfaction interfere with the folfilment qfothers' needs. Insofar as one is engaged in a private project, that obligation lapses. The underlying strategy of James's utilitarian/pragmatist philosophy of religion is to privatize religion. This privatization allows him to construe the supposed tension between science and religion as the illusion of opposition between cooperative endeavours and private projects. 6 On a pragmatist account, scientific inquiry is best viewed as the attempt to find a single, unified, coherent description of the world the description which makes it easiest to predict the consequences of events and actions, and thus easiest to gratifY certain human desires. When pragmatists say that 'creationist science' is bad science, their point is that it subordinates these desires to other, less widespread desires. But since religion has aims other than gratification ofour need

to predict and control, it is not clear that there need be a quarrel between religion and orthodox, atoms-and-void science, any more than between literature and science. Further, if a private relationship with God is not accompanied by a claim to knowledge of the Divine Will, there may be no conflict between religion and utilitarian ethics. A suitably privatized form of religious belief might dictate neither one's scientific beliefs nor anybody's moral choices save one's own. That form of belief might be able to gratifY a need without threatening to thwart any needs of any others, and would thus meet the utilitarian test. W. K. Clifford,James's chosen opponent in 'The Will to Believe', thinks that we have a duty to seek the truth, distinct from our duty to seek happiness. His way of describing this duty is not as a duty to get reality right, but rather as a duty not to believe without evidence. James quotes him as saying that 'if a belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, the pleasure is a stolen one ... It is sinful, because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind ... It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.'7 Clifford asks us to be responsive to 'evidence', as well as to human needs. So the question between James and Clifford comes down to this: Is evidence something which floats free of human projects, or is the demand for evidence simply a demand from other human beings for cooperation on such projects? The view that evidential relations have a kind of existence independent of human projects takes various forms, of which the most prominent are realism and foundationalism. Realist philosophers say that the only true source of evidence is the world as it is in itself.8 The pragmatist objections to realism start from the claim that ' ... it is impossible to strip the human element from even our most abstract theorizing. All our mental categories without exception have been evolved because of their fruitfulness for life, and owe their being to historic circumstances, just as much as do the nouns and verbs and adjectives in which our languages clothe them. '9 If pragmatists are right about this, the only question at issue between them and realists is whether the notion of 'the world as it is in itself' can be made fruitful

for life. James's criticism of correspondence theories of truth boils down to the argument that a belief's purported 'fit' with the intrinsic nature of reality adds nothing which makes any practical difference to the fact that it is widely agreed to lead to successful action. Foundationalism is an epistemological view which can be adopted by those who suspend judgement on the realist's claim that reality has an intrinsic nature. A foundationalist need only claim that every belief occupies a place in a natural, transcultural, transhistorical order of reasons - an order which eventually leads the inquirer back to one or another 'ultimate source of evidence'. 10 Different foundationalists offer different candidates for such sources: for example, Scripture, tradition, clear and distinct ideas, sense-experience, common sense. Pragmatists object to foundationalism for the same reasons as they object to realism. They think that the question of whether my inquiries trace a natural order of reasons or merely respond to the demands for justification prevalent in my culture is, like the question whether the physical world is found or made, one to which the answer can make no practical difference. Clifford's demand for evidence can, however, be put in a minimalist form - one which avoids both realism and foundationalism, and which concedes toJames that intellectual responsibility is simply responsibility to people with whom one has joined in a shared endeavour. In this minimalist form, this demand presupposes only that the meaning of statement consists in the inferential relations which it bears to other statements. To use the language in which the sentence is phrased commits one, on this view, to believing that a statement S is true if, and only if, one also believes that certain other statements which permit an inference to A, and still others which can be inferred from A, are true. The wrongness of believing without evidence is, therefore, the wrongness of pretending to participate in a common project while refusing to play by the rules. This view oflanguage was encapsulated in the positivist slogan that the meaning of a statement is its method of verification. The positivists argued that the sentences used to express religious belief are typically not hooked up to the rest of the language in the right inferential way, and hence can express only pseudobeliefs. The positivists, being I

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empmClst foundationalists, thought the 'the right inferential way' meant 'making appeal, ultimately, to sense experience'. But a nonfoundationalist neopositivist can still put forward the following dilemma: If there are inferential connections, then there is a duty to argue; if there are not, then we are not dealing with a belief at all. So even ifwe drop the foundationalist notion of'evidence', Clifford's point can still be restated in terms ofthe responsibility to argue. A minimal Clifford-like view can be summed up in the claim that, although your emotions are your own business, your beliefs are everybody's business. There is no way in which the religious person can claim a right to believe as part of an overall right to privacy. For believing is inherendy a public project: all us language-users are in it together. We all have a responsibility to each other not to believe anything which cannot be justified to the rest of us. To be rational is to submit one's beliefs - all one's beliefs - to the judgement of one's peers. James resists this view. In 'The Will to Believe' he gave an argument for doing so. Most readers of that essay have thought it a failure, and that James there offers an unconvincing excuse for intellectual irresponsibility. James argues that there are live, momentous and forced options which cannot be decided by evidence - cannot, as James put it, 'be decided on intellectual grounds'. But people who side with Clifford typically rejoin that, where evidence and argument are unavailable, intellectual responsibility requires that options cease to be either live or forced. The responsible inquirer, they say, does not let herself be confronted by options of the sort James describes. When evidence and argument are unavailable, so, they think, is belief, or at least responsible belief. Desire, hope, and other noncognitive states can legitimately be had without evidence - can legitimately be turned over to what James calls 'our passional nature' - but belief cannot. In the realm of belief, which options are live and forced is not a private matter. The same options face us all; the same truth candidates are proposed to everyone. It is intellectually irresponsible either to disregard these options or to decide between these truth candidates in any other way than by argument from the sort of evidence which the very meanings of our words tell us is required for their support. This nice sharp distinction between the cognitive and the non-

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cognitive, between belief and desire, is, however just the sort ofdualism which James wants to blur. On the traditional account, desire should play no role in the fixation of belief. On a pragmatist account, the only point of having beliefs in the first place is to gratifY desires.James's claim that thinking is 'only there for behavior's sake'll is his improved version of Hume's claim that 'reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions'. If one accepts that claim, one will have reason to be as dubious as James was of the purportedly necessary antagonism between science and religion. For, as I said earlier, these two areas of culture fulfil two different sets of desires. Science enables us to predict and control, whereas religion offers us a larger hope, and thereby something to live for. To ask, 'Which of their two accounts of the universe is true?' may be as poindess as asking, 'Is the carpenter's or the particle physicist's account of tables the true one?' For neither question needs to be answered if we can figure out a strategy for keeping the two accounts out of each other's way. 12 Consider James's characterization of the 'religious hypothesis' as that (1) 'the best things are the more eternal things' and that (2) 'we are better even now if we believe [1]'.13 Many people have said, when they reach this point in 'The Will to Believe', that if that hypothesis exhausts what James means by 'religion', then he is not talking about what they, or Clifford, are interested in. I shall return to this objection shordy. For now I merely remark that if you had asked James to specify the difference between accepting this hypothesis (a 'cognitive' state) and simply trusting the larger hope (a 'noncognitive' state) - or the difference between believing that the best things are the eternal things and relishing the thought that they are - he might well have replied that such differences do not make any difference. 14 What does it matter, one can imagine him asking, whether you call it a belief, a desire, or a hope, a mood, or some complex of these, so long as it has the same cash value in directing action? We know what religious faith is, we know what it does for people. People have a right to have such faith, just as they have a right to fall in love, to marry in haste, and to persist in love despite endless sorrow and disappointment. In all such cases, 'our passional nature' asserts its rights.

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I suggested earlier that a utilitarian ethics of belief will reinterpret James's intellectual-passion distinction so as to make it coincide with a distinction between what needs justification to other human beings and what does not. A business proposal, for example needs such justification, but a marriage proposal (in our romantic and democratic culture) does not. Such an ethics will defend religious belief by saying, with Mill, that our right to happiness is limited only by others' rights not to have their own pursuits of happiness interfered with. This right to happiness includes the rights to faith, hope and love - intentional states which can rarely be justified, and typically should not have to be justified, to our peers. Our intellectual responsibilities are responsibilities to cooperate with others on common projects designed to promote the general welfare (projects such as constructing a unified science, or a uniform commercial code), and not to interfere with their private projects. For the latter - projects such as getting married or getting religion - the question of intellectual responsibility does not anse. James's critics will hear this riposte as an admission that religion is not a cognitive matter, and that his 'right to believe' is a misnomer for 'the right to yearn' or 'the right to hope' or 'the right to take comfort in the thought that .. .' But James is not making, and should not make, such an admission. He is, rather, insisting that the impulse to draw a sharp line between the cognitive and noncognitive, and between beliefs and desires, even when this explanation is relevant to neither the explanation nor the justification of behaviour, is a residue of the false (because useless) belief that we should engage in two distinct quests - one for truth and the other for happiness. Only that belief could persuade us to say amici socii, sed magis arnica veritas. The philosophy of religion I have just sketched out is one which is shadowed forth in much ofJames's work, and is the one he slwuld have invoked when replying to Clifford. Unfortunately, in 'The Will to Believe', he attempts a different strategy, and gets off on the wrong foot. Rather than fuzzing up the distinction between the cognitive and the noncognitive, as he should have, James here takes it for granted, and thus yields the crucial terrain to his opponent. The italicized thesis

of 'The Will to Believe' reads: 'Our passional nature not onlY lawfollY ml9', but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds'. 15 Here, as in his highly unpragmatic claim that 'in our dealings with objective nature we obviously are recorders, not makers of the truth', 16 James accepts exacrly what he should reject: the idea that the mind is divided nearly down the middle into intellect and passion, and the idea that possible topics of discussion are divided nearly into the cognitive and the noncognitive ones. When philosophy goes antifoundationalist, the notion of 'source of evidence' gets replaced by that of 'consensus about what would count as evidence'. So objectivity as intersubjectivity replaces objectivity as fidelity to something nonhuman. The question, 'Is there any evidence for p?' gets replaced by the question, 'Is there any way of getting a consensus on what would count in favour ofP?' The distinction between setrling the question of p on intellectual grounds and turning it over to one's passional nature thus turns into the question, 'Am I going to be able to justifY p to other people?' So James should have rephrased the issue between Clifford and himself as, 'What sort of belief, if any, can I have in good conscience, even after I realize that I cannot justifY this belief to others?' The stark Cliffordian position says: No beliefs, only hopes, desires, yearnings and the like. The quasi:Jamesian position I want to defend says: Do not worry too much about whether what you have is a belief, a desire, or a mood. Just insofar as such states as hope, love and faith promote only such private projects, you need not worry about whether you have a right to have them. Still, to suggest that the tension between science and religion can be resolved merely by saying that the two serve different ends may sound absurd. But it is no more nor less absurd than the attempt by liberal (mosrly Protestant) theologians to demythologize Christianity, and more generally to immunize religious belief from criticism based on accounts of the universe which trace the origin of human beings, and of their intellectual faculties, to the unplanned movements of elementary particles. 17 For some people, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, the effect of this latter attempt is to drain all the point out of religion. Theologies which

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require no sacrfficium intellectus are, these people think, hardly worth discussing. MacIntyre disdainfully remarks oITillich that his 'definition of God in terms of ultimate human concern in effect makes of God no more than an interest of human nature'. 18 A pragmatist, however, can reply that Tillich did nothing worse to God than pragmatist philosophy of science had already done to the elementary particles. Pragmatists think that those particles are not the very joints at which things as they are in themselves divide, but are objects which we should have had no reason to mention unless we had devoted ourself to one of the many interests ofhuman nature - the interest in predicting and controlling our environment. Pragmatists are not instrumentalists, in the sense of people who believe that quarks are 'mere heuristic fictions'. They think that quarks are as real as tables, but that quark talk and table talk need not get in each other's way, since they need not compete for the role of What is There Anyway, apart from human needs and interests. Similarly, pragmatist theists are not anthropocentrists, in the sense of believing that God is a 'mere posit'. They believe that God is as real as sense impressions, tables, quarks and human rights. But, they add, stories about our relations to God do not necessarily run athwart the stories of our relations to these other things. Pragmatist theists, however, do have to get along without personal immortality, providential intervention, the efficacy of sacraments, the Virgin Birth, the Risen Christ, the Covenant with Abraham, the authority of the Koran, and a lot of other things which many theists are loath to do without. Or, if they want them, they will have to interpret them 'symbolically' in a way which MacIntyre will regard as disingenuous, for they must prevent them from providing premises for practical reasoning. But demythologizing is, pragmatist theists think, a small price to pay for insulating these doctrines from 'scientific' criticism. Demythologizing amounts to saying that, whatever theism is good for, it is not a device for predicting or controlling our environment. From a utilitarian point of view, both MacIntyre and 'scientific realists' (philosophers who insist that, in Sellars's words, 'science is the measure of the things that are, that they are') are unfairly privileging

some human interests, and therefore some areas of culture, over others. 19 To insist on the 'literal reality' of the Resurrection is of a piece with insisting, in the manner of David Lewis, that the only non-'gerrymandered' objects in the universe - the only objects that have not been shaped by human interests - are those of which particle physics speaks. 20 For utilitarians, it is not a sense of intellectual responsibility which makes us think that we must choose between religion and science, but rather an unwillingness to admit that both, equally, are what they are because human beings have the interests they do. Scientific realism and religious fundamentalism are products of the same urge. The attempt to convince people that they have a duty to develop what Bernard Williams calls an 'absolute conception of reality' is, from a Tillichian or Jamesian point of view, of a piece with the attempt to live 'for God only', and to insist that others do so also. Both scientific realism and religious fundamentalism are private projects which have got out of hand. They are attempts to make one's own private way of giving meaning to one's own life - a way which romanticizes one's relation to something starkly and magnificently nonhuman, something Ultimately True and Real - obligatory for the general public. I said earlier that many readers of 'The Will to Believe' feel let down when they discover that the only sort of religion James has been discussing is something as wimpy as the belief that 'perfection is eternal'. They have a point. For when Clifford raged against the intellectual irresponsibility of the thesis, what he really had in mind was the moral irresponsibility of fundamentalists - the people who burnt people at the stake, forbade divorce and dancing, and found various other ways of making their neighbours miserable for the greater glory of God. 21 Once 'the religious hypothesis' is disengaged from the opportunity to inflict humiliation and pain on people who do not profess the correct creed, it loses interest for many people. It loses interest for many more once it is disengaged from the promise that we shall see our loved ones after death. Similarly, once science is disengaged from the claim to know reality as it is in itself it loses its

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appeal for the sort of person who sees pragmatism as a frivolous, or treasonous, dereliction of our duty to Truth. A pragmatist philosophy of religion must follow Tillich and others in distinguishing quite sharply between faith and belief. Liberal Protestants, to whom Tillich sounds plausible, are quite willing to talk about their faith in God, but demur at spelling out just what beliefs that faith includes. Fundamentalist Catholics, to whom Tillich sounds blasphemous, are happy to enumerate their beliefs by reciting the Creed, and to identifY their faith with those beliefs. The reason the Tillichians think they can get along either without creeds, or with a blessedly vague symbolic interpretation of credal statements, is that they think the point of religion is not to produce any specific habit of action, but rather to make the sort of difference to a human life which is made by the presence or absence oflove. The best way to make Tillich and fuzziness look good, and to make creeds look bad, is to emphasize the similarity between having faith in God and being in love with another human being. People often say that they would not be able to go on if it were not for their love for their spouse or their children. This love is often not capable of being spelled out into beliefs about the character, or the actions, of these beloved people. Further, this love often seems inexplicable to people acquainted with those spouses and children - just as inexplicable as faith in God seems to those who contemplate the extent of seemingly unnecessary human misery. But we do not mock a mother who believes in her sociopathic child's essential goodness, even when that goodness is visible to no one else. James urges us not to mock those who accept what James calls 'the religious hypothesis' - the hypothesis that says 'the best things are the more eternal things'22 - merely because we see no evidence for this hypothesis, and a lot of evidence against it. The loving mother is not attempting to predict and control the behaviour of her child, andJames's ascent to the religious hypothesis is not part of an attempt to predict and control anything at all. Concentration on the latter attempt, the attempt to which most of common sense and science is devoted, gives rise to the idea that all intentional states are either beliefs or desires: for the actions we take on the basis of prediction and in the hope of control are the results of

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practical syllogisms, and such syllogisms must include both a desire that a given state of affairs obtain and the belief that a certain action will help it do so. The same concentration gives rise to the idea that anything that counts as a belief-as a cognitive state - must be capable of being cashed out in terms of specific practical consequences, and to the related idea that we must be able to spell out the inferential relations between any belief and other beliefs in considerable, and quite specific, detail. These two ideas have often led commentators to see a tension betweenJames's pragmatism and his trust in his own religious experiences, and between the Dewey of Reconstruction in Philosophy and the Dewey of A Common Faith. The question of whether the tension seen inJames's and Dewey's works is real or apparent boils down to the question: Can we disengage religious belief from inferential links with other beliefs by making them too vague to be caught in a creed - by fuzzing them up in Tillichian ways - and still be faithful to the familiar pragmatist doctrine that beliefs have content only by virtue of inferential relations to other beliefs?23 To give up this latter claim would be to abandon the heart of both classical and contemporary pragmatism, for it would be to abandon the holistic view of intentional content which permits pragmatists to substitute objectivity as intersubjectivity for objectivity as correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality. But what becomes ofintersubjectivity once we admit that there is no communal practice ofjustification - no shared language game - which gives religious statements their content? The question of whether James and Dewey are inconsistent now becomes the question: Is there some practice other thanjustification of beliefs by beliefs which can give content to utterances? Yes, there is. Contemporary externalists in the philosophy of mind insist, as James and Dewey would heartily agree, that the only reason we attribute intentional states to human beings at all is that doing so enables us to explain what they are doing, and so helps us figure out what they might do next. When we encounter paradigmatic cases of unjustifiable beliefs - Kierkegaard's belief in the Incarnation, the mother's belief in the essential goodness of her sociopathic child - we can still use the attribution of such beliefs to explain what is going on:

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why Kierkegaard, or the mother, are doing what they are doing. We can give content to an utterance like 'I love him' or 'I have faith in Him' by correlating such utterances with patterns of behaviour, even when we cannot do so by fixing the place of such utterances in a network of inferential relations. The fact that Kierkegaard is not about to explain how Christ can be both mortal and immortal, nor the mother to say how a good person could have done what her child has done, is irrelevant to the utility of ascribing those beliefs to them. Just as we can often answer the question, 'Why did she do that?' by attributing a practical syllogism to the agent, so we can often answer it simply by saying, 'She loves him' or, 'She hopes against hope that he .. .' or, 'She has faith in him'. The 'him' here may be either her son, her lover, or her god. We thereby give an explanation of action which is not capable of being broken down into beliefs and desires - into individual sentential attitudes connected with other such attitudes by familiar inferential links - but which is none the less genuinely explanatory. So far 1 have been content to accept James's own description of the religious hypothesis. But it is, 1 think, an unfortunate one. Just as 1 think James took the wrong tack, and partially betrayed his own pragmatism, in his reply to Clifford, so 1 think that he betrayed his own better instincts when he chose this definition of religion. 24 For that definition associates religion with the conviction that a power that is not ourselves will do unimaginably vast good, rather than with the hope that we ourselves will do such good. Such a definition of religion stays at the second of Dewey's three stages of the development of the religious consciousness - the one Dewey called 'the point now reached by religious theologians' - by retaining the notion of something nonhuman which is nevertheless on the side of human beings. 25 The kind of religious faith which seems to me to lie behind the attractions of both utilitarianism and pragmatism is, instead, a faith in the future possibilities of moral humans, a faith which is hard to distinguish from love for, and hope for, the human community. 1 shall call this fuzzy overlap of faith, hope and love 'romance'. Romance, in this sense, may crystallize around a trade union as easily as around

a congregation, around a novel as easily as around a sacrament, around a God as easily as around a child. There is a passage in the work of the contemporary novelist Dorothy Allison which may help explain what 1 have in mind. Towards the beginning of a remarkable essay called 'Believing in Literature', Allison says that 'literature, and my own dream of writing, has shaped my own system of belief - a kind of atheist's religion ... the backbone of my convictions has been a belief in the progress of human society as demonstrated in its fiction'.26 She ends the essay as follows: There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto - God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power oflove, or even righteous anger. Sometimes 1 think they are all the same. A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imaginedY What 1 like best about this passage is Allison's suggestion that all these may be the same, that it does not gready matter whether we state our reason to believe - our insistence that some or all finite, mortal humans can be far more than they have yet become - in religious, political, philosophical, literary, sexual or familial terms. What matters is the insistence itself - the romance, the ability to experience overpowering hope, or faith, or love (or, sometimes, rage). What is distinctive about this state is that it carries us beyond argument, because beyond presendy used language. It thereby carries us beyond the imagination of the present age of the world. 1 take this state to be the one described (in italics) by James as 'a positive content rif experience which is literally and objectively true as for as it goes': namely, 'the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider selfthrough which saving experiences come'. 28 The images and tropes which connect one with this wider self may be, as Allison suggests, political or familial, literary or credal. 1 think James would have liked Allison's pluralism, and would have thought that what she says in the above passage harmonizes with his own praise of polytheism in the final pages of Varieties, and with his insistence that, 'The divine can mean no single quality, it must

mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions'.29 In past ages of the world, things were so bad that 'a reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat' was hard to get except by looking to a power not ourselves. In those days, there was little choice but to sacrifice the intellect in order to grasp hold of the premises of practical syllogisms - premises concerning the after-death consequences of baptism, pilgrimage or participation in holy wars. To be imaginative and to be religious, in those dark times, came to almost the same thing - for this world was too wretched to lift up the heart. But things are different now, because of human beings' gradual success in making their lives, and their world, less wretched. Nonreligious forms of romance have flourished ~ if only in those lucky parts of the world where wealth, leisure, literacy and democracy have worked together to prolong our lives and fill our libraries. 3o Now the things of this world are, for some lucky people, so welcome that they do not have to look beyond nature to the supernatural, and beyond life to an afterlife, but only beyond the human past to the human future. James fluctuated between two states of mind, two ways of dealing with the panic which both he and his father had experienced, and the return ofwhich he always dreaded. 31 In one of these, the Whitmanesque dream of plural, democratic vistas stretching far away into the future was enough. 32 Then he would respond to the possibility of panic by saying, as in the quotation from Fitzjames Stephen which ends 'The Will to Believe': 'Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes ... If death ends all, we cannot meet death better'. 33 In those moods,James could find this bravura as appropriate for the death of the species as for that of an individual. But in other moods James was unable to shrug off panic in the name of healthy mindedness, unable to rid himself of a panic-inducing picture of mankind as in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and

to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature's portion. 34 In such moods he is driven to adopt the 'religious hypothesis' that somewhere, somehow, perfection is eternal, and to identify 'the notion of God' with the 'guarantee' of ' an ideal order that shall be permanently perserved'.35 In such moods he demanded, at a minimum, what Whitehead called 'objective immortality' - the memory of human achievements in the mind of a 'fellow-sufferer who understands'. 36 At the maximum, he hoped that in his own best moments he had made contact with that mind. All of us, I think, fluctuate between such moods. We fluctuate between God as a perhaps obsolete name for a possible human future, and God as an external guarantor of some such future. Those who, like Dewey, would like to link their days each to each by transmuting their early religious belief into a belief in the human future, come to think of God as Friend rather than as Judge and Saviour. Those who, like me, were raised atheist and now find it merely confusing to talk about God, nevertheless fluctuate between moods in which we are content with utility and moods in which we hanker after validity as well. So we waver between what I have called 'romance' and needy, chastened humility. Sometimes it suffices to trust the human community, thought of as part of what Dewey called 'the community of causes and consequences in which we, together with those not born, are enmeshed . . . the widest and deepest symbol of the mysterious totality of being the imagination calls the universe'.37 Sometimes it does not. James was not always content to identifY the 'wider self through which saving experiences come' with Dewey's 'widest and deepest symbol' of the universe. In Whitmanesque moods he could identifY this wider self with an Americanized humanity at the farthest reach of the democratic vistas. Then he could (to paraphrase the title of his father's book) think of democracy as the Redeemed Form of God. But in Wordsworthian moods he held what he called an 'over-belief' in something far more deeply interfused with nature than the transitory glory of democratic fellowship. Then he thought of the self from which

saving experiences come as standing to even a utopian human community as the latter stands to the consciousness of our dogs and cats. 38 We can, I think, learn two lessons from recapitulating what Henry Levinson calls 'the religious investigations of William James' . The first is that we latest heirs of time are lucky enough to have considerable discretion about which options will be live for us and which will not. Unlike our less fortunate ancestors, we are in the position to put aside the unromantic, foundationalist view that all the truth candidates, and thus all the momentous options, have always already been available, live, and forced - because they are built into a language always and inevitably spoken by common sense. We can, with James, relish the thought that our descendants may face live and forced options which we shall never imagine. The second lesson is that, since letting his liveliest option be the choice between Whitman and Wordsworth between two Romantic poets rather than between an atheistic creed and a theistic one - was enough to satistyJames's own religious needs, it may be enough to satisty ours.

* * * * NOTES 1 William James, 'The Will to Believe' in The Will to Believe and Other Essqys in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). 2James, 'The Will to Believe', p. 148. 3 But Habermas, unlike James and Dewey, still believes in a 'transcendent moment of universal validity'. I have argued against Habermas's retention of this Kantian doctrine in 'Sind Aussage Universelle Geltungsanspruche?, Deutsche Zeitschriftfiir Philosophie, Spring 1995. 4 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975)· 5 In fact I prefer a third strategy, that of Davidson, who cuts truth offfrom justification by making it a nonepistemic notion. I defend the counterintuitive implications of this strategy in 'Is Truth a Goal ofInquiry?: Donald Davidson vs. Crispin Wright' in my Truth and Progress.

6 Many people would agree with Stephen Carter's claim that this reduces religion to a 'hobby', and would accept his invidious contrast between a mere 'individual metaphysic' and a 'tradition of group worship'. (See his The Culture qfDisbeliif: How American lAW and Politics T rivialize Religious Devotinn (New York: Basic Books, 1993), especially chapter 2). I argue against Carter's views in the next chapter in this book, 'Religion as Conversation-stopper'. 7 James, 'The Will to Believe', p. 18. 8 See, for example,John McDowell's claim that without 'direct confrontation by a worldly state of affairs itself', thought's 'bearing on the world' will remain inexplicable (Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1994), pp. 142 -3). 9James, Essqys, ComTT/£Tlts, and Reviews (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). Compare Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 514. 10 See Michael Williams, Unnatural Doubts (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. II6: ' ... we can characterize foundationalism as the view that our beliefs, simply in virtue of certain elements in their contents, stand in natural epistemological relatinns and thus fall into natural epistemological kinds'. I I James, 'The Will to Believe', p. 92. 12 Although I have no proof text to cite, I am convinced thatJames's theory of truth as 'the good in the way of belief' originated in the need to reconcile his admiration for his father with his admiration for such scientific friends as Peirce and Chauncey Wright. 13James, 'The Will to Believe', pp. 29-30. Note that for a pragmatist (2) is superfluous; 'p' and 'we are better off even now if we believe p' comes pretty close, for pragmatists, to saying the same thing. 14 Pragmatists can, of course, make a distinction between hope and knowledge in cases where knowledge of causal mechanisms is available. The quack hopes, but the medical scientist knows, that the pills will cure. But in other cases, such as marriage, the distinction often cannot usefully be drawn. Does the groom know, or merely hope, that he is marrying the right person? Either description will explain his actions equally well. 15James, 'The Will to Believe', p. 20. 16 James, 'The Will to Believe', p. 26. Here James buys in on a dualism between objective nature (The Way the World Is) and something else - a dualism which critics of the correspondence theory of truth, such as the future author of Pragmatism, must eventually abjure.

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17 Paul Tillich claimed that his existentialist, symbolic theology was an expression of 'The Protestant Principle' - the impulse that led Luther to despise scholastic proofs of God's existence and to label Reason 'a whore'. james said that, 'as, to papal minds, protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt will pragmatism often seem to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy' (Pragmatism, p. 62); see also Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). 18 Alasdair Macintyre and Paul Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 53. 19 In his 'Atheism, Relativism, Enlightenment and Truth' (Studies in Religion, vol. 23, pp. 167-78), my fellow pragmatist Barry Allen remarks that Hume saw no need to proclaim himself an atheist. Holbach and Diderot, by contrast, did see a need, for, unlike Hume, they substituted a duty to Truth for a duty to God, a duty explained in terms of what Allen elsewhere (in his Truth in PhilosoplrJ) has called an 'onto-logical', specifically antipragmatic, account of truth. Holbach would, today, proclaim himself a scientific realist, and therefore an atheist. Hume would proclaim himself neither. 20 See David Lewis, 'Putnam's Paradox', Australasian Journal of PhilosoplrJ,

1983, pp. 226-8. 21 See, for example, Clifford's 'The Influence Upon Morality of a Decline in Religious Belief' in his Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1879), vol. II, pp. 244-52. 22james, 'The Will to Believe', p. 29. 23 Davidson and other externalists have emphasized that this claim is compatible with saying that we can attribute content to intentional states only if we are able to correlate utterances with their extra-mental causes. They have, I think, thereby shown us how to be radically holistic and coherentist without running the danger of 'losing touch' with the world. Realist philosophers such as McDowell, however, have doubted whether Davidson's view allows 'cognitive' as opposed to merely 'causal' connections with the world. I attempt to reply to these doubts in 'The Very Idea of Answerability to the World' in my Truth and Progress. 24 Acceptance of the claim that 'perfection is eternal' was not, of course, james's only definition of religion. He had as many conflictingquasi-definatory things to say about religions as he did about truth. 25 See john Dewey, A Comrrwn Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1934), p. 73· Dewey's own conception of the 'the human abode' is not of something nonhuman but friendly, but rather of a Wordsworthian community with nonhuman nature, with Spinoza's 'face of the whole universe'. 26 Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about sex, class and literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1994), p. 166. 27 Allison, p. 181. 28 james, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 405. 29james, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 384. 30james said that there is reason to think that 'the coarser religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and miracles and supernatural operations, may possibly never be displaced. Some constitutions need them too much' (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 136). He could have added that people placed in certain circumstances (no wealth, no literacy, no luck) also need them too much. 31 'Not the conception or intellectual perception of evil, but the grisly bloodfreezing heart-palsying sensation of it close upon one ... How irrelevandy remote seem all our usual refined optimisms and intellectual and moral consolations in the presence of a need of help like this! Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help!' (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 135). 32 Seejames's 'pluralistic way ofinterpreting' Whitman's 'To You' (Pragmatism, p. 133), and his account of the 'the great religious difference', the one 'between the men who insist that world must and sholl be, and those who are contented with believing that the world may be, saved' (Pragmatism, p. 135). 33james, 'The Will to Believe', p. 33. 34 james, Varieties ofReligious Experience, p. 120. 35james, Pragmatism, p. 55. 36 A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), pp. 532-3. 37 Dewey, p. 85· 38 james, Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 518-19.

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I I.

Religion As Conversation-stopper (1994)

These days intellectuals divide up into those who think that something new and important called 'the postmodern' is happening, and those who, like Habermas, think we are (or should be) still plugging away at the familiar tasks set for us by the Enlightenment. The ones who, like me, agree with Habermas typically see the secularization of public life as the Enlightenment's central achievement, and see our job as the same as our predecessors': getting our fellow citizens to rely less on tradition, and to be more willing to experiment with new customs and institutions. Our scepticism about the postmodern may incline us to be sceptical also about the modern, and, more specifically, about Virginia Woolf's Foucault-like claim that human nature changed around 1910. But something crucially important to the progress of secularization did happen around then. To remind ourselves of what it was, it helps to reread In Memoriam. One of the striking things about the poem is the poet's need, and ability, to believe in the immortality of the soul. One of the striking things about the biographies of Tennyson is the biographers' agreement that Tennyson and Hallam never went to bed together. Two young men who loved each other that much would, nowadays, be quite likely to do so. But the same religious beliefs that let Tennyson hope so fervently to see his friend in heaven also kept him out of Hallam's arms. The big change in the outlook of the intellectuals - as opposed to a change in human nature - that happened around 1910 was that they began to be confident that human beings had only bodies, and no souls. The resulting this-worldliness made them receptive to the idea that one's sexual behaviour did not have much to do with one's moral

worth - an idea that the Enlightenment-minded author of'Locksley Hall' still found impossible to accept. It is hard to disentangle the idea that we have an immortal soul from the belief that this soul can be stained by the commission of certain sexual acts. For sex is the first thing that comes to mind when we think about the human body as something located down there, underneath the human soul. So when we started thinking that we might have only complicated, accomplished, vulnerable bodies, and no souls, the word 'impurity' began to lose both sexual overtones and moral resonance. For these reasons, the biggest gap between the typical intellectual and the typical nonintellectual is that the former does not use 'impurity' as a moral term, and does not find religion what James called a 'live, forced and momentous option'. She thinks of religion as, at its best, Whitehead's 'what we do with our solitude', rather than something people do together in churches. Such an intellectual is bound to be puzzled or annoyed by Stephen L. Carter's TIe Culture ifDisbelief How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion. For Carter puts in question what, to atheists like me, seems the happy, Jeffersonian compromise that the Enlightenment reached with the religious. This compromise consists in privatizing religion - keeping it out of what Carter calls 'the public square', making it seem bad taste to bring religion into discussions of public policy. Whereas many religiously inclined intellectuals stick to what he calls an 'individual metaphysic', Carter, an Episcopalian, defines religion as 'a tradition of group worship'. We atheists, doing our best to enforceJefferson's compromise, think it bad enough that we cannot run for public office without being disingenuous about our disbelief in God; despite the compromise, no uncloseted atheist is likely to get elected anywhere in the country. We also resent the suggestion that you have to be religious to have a conscience - a suggestion implicit in the fact that only religious conscientious objectors to military service go unpunished. Such facts suggest to us that the claims of religion need, if anything, to be pushed back still further, and that religious believers have no business asking for more public respect than they now receive. Carter, however, thinks that privatizing religion trivializes it. He says that 'the legal culture

that guards the public square still seems most comfortable thinking of religion as a hobby, something done in privacy, something that mature, public-spirited adults do not use as the basis for politics'. Carter's inference from privatization to trivialization is invalid unless supplemented with the premise that the nonpolitical is always trivial. But this premise seems false. Our family or love lives are private, nonpolitical and nontrivial. The poems we atheists write, like the prayers our religious friends raise, are private, nonpolitical and nontrivial. Writing poems is, for many people, no mere hobby, even though they never show those poems to any save their intimates. The same goes for reading poems, and for lots of other private pursuits that both give meaning to individual human lives and are such that mature, public-spirited adults are quite right in not attempting to use them as a basis for politics. The search for private perfection, pursued by theists and atheists alike, is neither trivial nor, in a pluralistic democracy, relevant to public policy. Carter criticizes the effort by the contemporary liberal philosophers to create a conversational space in which individuals of very different viewpoints can join dialogic battle, in accord with a set ofdialogic conventions that all can accept. The philosophical idea is that even though all of us have differing personal backgrounds and biases, we nevertheless share certain moral premises in common. Carter here gives a good description both of the least common denominator of the positions of Rawls and Habermas, the two most prominent social thinkers of the present day, and of the central secularizing message of the Enlightenment. He is quite right to say that 'all these efforts to limit the conversation to premises held in common would exclude religion from the mix'. But he thinks that such exclusion is unjust. Such exclusion, however, is at the heart of the Jeffersonian compromise, and it is hard to see what more just arrangement Carter thinks might take the place of that compromise. Contemporary liberal philosophers think that we shall not be able to keep a democratic political community going unless the religious believers remain willing to trade

privatization for a guarantee of religious liberty, and Carter gives us no reason to think they are wrong. The main reason religion needs to be privatized is that, in political discussion with those outside the relevant religious community, it is a conversation-stopper. Carter is right when he says: One good way to end a conversation - or to start an argument - is to tell a group of well-educated professionals that you hold a political position (preferably a controversial one, such as being against abortion or pornography) because it is required by your understanding of God's will. Saying this is far more likely to end a conversation than to start an argument. The same goes for telling the group, 'I would never have an abortion' or, 'Reading pornography is about the only pleasure I get out of life these days.' In these examples, as in Carter's, the ensuing silence masks the group's inclination to say, 'So what? We weren't discussing your private life; we were discussing public policy. Don't bother us with matters that are not our concern.' This would be my own inclination in such a situation. Carter clearly thinks such a rea€tion inappropriate, but it is hard to figure out what he thinks would be an appropriate response by nonreligious interlocutors to the claim that abortion is required (or forbidden) by the will of God. He does not think it good enough to say: OK, but since I don't think there is such a thing as the will of God, and since I doubt that we'll get anywhere arguing theism vs. atheism, let's see if we have some shared premises on the basis of which to continue our argument about abortion. He thinks such a reply would be condescending and trivializing. But are we atheist interlocutors supposed to try to keep the conversation going by saying, 'Gee! I'm impressed. You must have a really deep, sincere faith'? Suppose we try that. What happens then? What can either party do for an encore? Carter says that he wants 'a public square that does not restrict its access to citizens willing to speak in a purely secular language, but instead is equally open to religious and nonreligious argument'. This may mean simply that he wants us atheists to stop screaming 'keep religion out of politics!' when the clergy say that abortion is against

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God's will while nodding approvingly when they say that gaybashing is. If so, I entirely agree with him. The best parts of his very thoughtful, and often persuasive, book are those in which he points up the inconsistency of our behaviour, and the hypocrisy involved in saying that believers somehow have no right to base their political views on their religious faith, whereas we atheists have every right to base ours on Enlightenment philosophy. The claim that in doing so we are appealing to reason, whereas the religious are be~g irrational, is hokum. Carter is quite right to debunk it. Carter is also right to say that liberal theory has not shown that 'the will of any of the brilliant philosophers of the liberal tradition, or, for that matter, the will of the Supreme Court of the United States, is more relevant to moral decisions than the will of God'. But he is wrong in suggesting that it has to show this. All liberal theory has to show is that moral decisions that are to be enforced by a pluralist and democratic state's monopoly of violence are best made by public discussion in which voices claiming to be God's, or reason's, or science's, are put on a par with everybody else's. It is one thing to say that religious beliefs, or the lack of them, will influence political convictions. Of course they will. It is another thing to say, as Carter says, that the public square should be open to 'religious argument', or that liberalism should 'develop a politics that accepts whatever form of dialogue a member of the public offers'. What is a specifically religious 'form of dialogue', except perhaps a dialogue in which some members cite religious sources for their beliefs? What could a specifically religious argument be, except an argument whose premises are accepted by some people because they believe that these premises express the will of God? I may accept those same premises for purely secular reasons - for example, reasons having to do with maximizing human happiness. Does that make my argument a nonreligious one? Even if it is exacdy the argument made by my religious fellow citizen? Surely the fact that one of us gets his premises in church and the other in the library is, and should be, of no interest to our audience in the public square. The arguments that take place there, political arguments, are best thought of as neither religious nor nonreligious.

Carter frequendy speaks of religion as a 'source of moral knowledge' rather than as a 'source of moral beliefs'. Of course, if we knew that religion were a source of moral knowledge, we should be foolish to shove it to the outskirts of the square. But part of the moral of Rawls's and Habermas's work - and especially of Habermas's replacement of 'subject-centred' with 'communicative' reason - is that we should be suspicious of the very idea of a 'source of moral knowledge'. It is reasonable to call a physics textbook or teacher a source of knowledge. Knowledge is justified true belief. Since physics is a relatively noncontroversial area, what such teachers and textbooks say is usually both justified and (as far as anybody now knows) true. When it comes to morals rather than science, .however, every textbook, Scripture and teacher is offset by a competing textbook, Scripture or teacher. That is why, in the public square of a pluralistic democracy, justification is always up for grabs, and why the term 'source of moral knowledge' will always be out of place. I take the point of Rawls and Habermas, as of Dewey and Peirce, to be that the epistemology suitable for such a democracy is one in which the only test of a political proposal is its ability to gain assent from people who retain radically diverse ideas about the point and meaning of human life, about the path to private perfection. The more such consensus becomes the test of a belief, the less important is the belief's source. So when Carter complains that religious citizens are forced 'to restructure their arguments in purely secular terms before they can be presented', I should reply that 'restructuring the arguments in purely secular terms' just means 'dropping reference to the source of the premises of the arguments', and that this omission seems a reasonable price to pay for religious liberty. Carter thinks that 'contemporary liberal philosophers ... make demands on [the religion's] moral conscience to reformulate that conscience - to destroy a vital aspect of the self - in order to gain the right to participate in the dialogue alongside other citizens'. But this requirement is no harsher, and no more a demand for self-destruction, than the requirement that we atheists, when we present our arguments, should claim no authority for our premises save the assent we hope they will gain from our audience. Carter seems to think that religious

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believers' moral convictions are somehow more deeply interwoven with their self-identity than those of atheists with theirs. He seems unwilling to admit that the role of Enlightenment ideology in giving meaning to the lives of atheists is just as great as Christianity's role in giving meaning to his own life. Occasionally he suggests that we contemporary liberal ideologues suffer from the same spiritual shallowness that American law attributes to the nonreligious pacifist. Even if this were the case, however, Carter would still need to tell us why a speaker's depth of spirituality is more relevant to her participation in public debate than her hobby or her hair colour.

Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics

12.

(1997) The death in June 1996 of Thomas S. Kuhn, the most influential philosopher to write in English since the Second World War, produced many long, respectful obituaries. Most of these obituaries referred to him as a historian of science rather than as a philosopher. Kuhn would not have objected to that description, but it is a bit misleading. If I had written an obituary, I should have made a point of calling Kuhn a great philosopher, for two reasons. First, I think that 'philosopher' is the most appropriate description for somebody who remaps culture - who suggests a new and promising way for us to think about the relation among various large areas of human activity. Kuhn's great contribution was to offer such a suggestion, one that has altered the self-images, and the rhetoric, of many different disciplines. My second reason for calling Kuhn a great philosopher is resentment over the fact that Kuhn was constantly being treated, by my fellow professors of philosophy, as at best a second-rate citizen of the philosophical community. Sometimes he was even treated as an intruder who had no business attempting to contribute to a discipline in which he was untrained. I do not think too much should be made of the fuzzy philosopher-nonphilosopher distinction, and I should hate to try to sharpen it up. But I found it annoying that people who used 'real philosopher' as an honorific when speaking of themselves and their friends should feel entitled to withhold it from Kuhn. Kuhn was one of my idols, because reading his The Structure rif Scientific RevolutioTIS (1962) had given me the sense of scales falling from my eyes. The fact that he came to philosophical issues sideways, so to speak - having taken a Ph.D. in physics and then becoming a self-taught

historian of seventeenth-century science - seemed to me a very bad reason to try to exclude him from our ranks. The main reason Kuhn was kept at arm's length by the philosophy professors in that anglophone philosophy is dominated by the so-called analytic tradition - a tradition that has prided itself in having made philosophy more like science and less like literature or politics. The last thing philosophers in this tradition want is to have the distinctiveness of science impugned - to be told, as Kuhn told them, that the successes of science are not due to the application of a special 'scientific method', and that the replacement of one scientific theory by another is not a matter of hard, cold logic, but comes about in the same way as does the replacement of one political institution by another. Kuhn's major contribution to remapping culture was to help us see that the natural scientists do not have a special access to reality or to truth. He helped dismantle the traditional hierarchy of disciplines, a hierarchy that dates back to Plato's image of the divided line. That line stretched from the messy material world up into a near immaterial world. In the hierarchy Plato proposed mathematics (which uses pure logic, and no rhetoric at all) is up at the top and literary criticism and political persuasion (which use mostly rhetoric, and practically no logic at all) are down at the bottom. Kuhn fuzzed up the distinction between logic and rhetoric by showing that revolutionary theory-change is not a matter of following our inferences, but of changing the terminology in which truth candidates were formulated, and thereby changing criteria of relevance. He helped break down the idea that there are 'canons of scientific reasoning' that Galileo had obeyed and Aristotle had not. He thereby helped make the question, 'How can we set out our discipline on the secure path of a science?', obsolete. This was the question that Kant had posed about philosophy, and to which Husserl and Russell had offered competing answers. It was the question that B. F. Skinner answered by asking psychologists to confine themselves to a vocabulary dominated by notions like 'stimulus', 'response', 'conditioning' and 'reinforcement'. It was the question Northrop Frye answered by suggesting a taxonomy of myths, a set of pigeonholes that future literary critics could occupy themselves with filling up.

Kuhn could not, of course, have made this question obsolete all by himself. He was abetted by the self-criticisms of analytic philosophy offered by the later Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, Goodman and others - self-criticisms that were the main topics of discussion within analytic philosophy at the time The Structure qfScientific Revolutions first appeared. All these self-critical analytic philosophers had, in their youths, bought in on Russell's suggestion that 'logic is the essence ofphilosophy' and on his vision of philosophy as a matter of analysing complexes into simples. But then they became sceptical both about the notion that there was something called 'logic' that would guide such analysis, and about the idea that there were any simples into which to analyse non-simples. Russell's candidates for such simples - sensory data, and clear and distinct ideas of such universals as the logical connectives no longer seemed satisfactory. Goodman pointed out that simplicity itself is relative to a choice of description. Sellars, like Kuhn, pointed out that there is no non-ad !we way to divide sensory experience up into what is 'given to the mind' and what is 'added by the mind'. Wittgenstein asked, 'Why did we think that logic was something sublime?' Quine and Goodman, taking a leaf from Skinner, pointed out that it might be better to view logic as a pattern of human behaviour rather than as an immaterial force shaping such behaviour. Nobody suggested that these internal critics of what Quine called 'dogmas of empiricism' - doctrines that Russell and Carnap had taken as self-evident - were 'not really philosophers'. For they did not endanger the professional self-esteem, the habit of self-congratulation, that made even the most self-critical analytic philosophers rejoice in having been born at the right time - a time in which philosophy had become clear, rigorous and scientific. Kuhn did endanger this self-esteem, because reading his book made analytic philosophers wonder if the notion of 'scientific clarity and rigour' was as clear, rigorous and scientific as they had assumed. I made myself somewhat unpopular among analytic philosophers by drawing, in various books and articles, some of the morals that seemed to me implicit in Kuhn's new map of culture. Drawing these morals was a way of overcoming my own earlier training. Carnap and others had persuaded me, in my early twenties, that philosophers

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should indeed try to become more 'scientific' and 'rigorous'. I was even briefly persuaded that learning symbolic logic was probably a good way of achieving this end. (Having been forced to learn the proofs of some of Goedel's results in order to pass my Ph.D. examinations, I became loftily condescending toward philosophers whose training left them unable to juggle logical symbols.) But by the time I had reached the age of 30 Uust about the time of the publication of Kuhn's Structure), I had begun to doubt whether the creative analytic philosophers, as opposed to the hacks, were using anything like an 'analytic method'. I could not see how the idea of such a method could survive the various attacks that had been made on Russell's candidates for 'simples'. It seemed to me that Quine, Sellars and Wittgenstein were just being brilliant, in idiosyncratic and freewheeling ways. I also had doubts about whether symbolic logic added more than a stylistic elegance to analytic philosophers' prose, and about whether the famous clarity and rigour on which my colleagues prided themselves (as I too had, for a time) amounted to more than a preference for answering certain sorts of questions and for ignoring others. As far as I could see, what made us 'analytic' had nothing to do with applying a method called 'conceptual analysis' or 'investigation of logical form'. All that united us was that we took certain doctrines advanced by Carnap and Russell seriously enough to want to refute them. Kuhn's notion of the history of science as a history of what he called 'disciplinary matrices' was a great help to me in formulating this view of analytic philosophy. So was his notion of paradigm. After reading Structure I began to think of analytic philosophy as one way of doing philosophy among others, rather than as the discovery of how to set philosophy on the secure path of a science. This led to a certain edginess in my relations with my colleagues, most of whom thought that Kuhn had shown, at most, that Carnap's 'logic of confirmation' needed a few ~inor qualifications. These colleagues did not think that Kuhn's work had any metaphilosophical implications. Camap and Russell, I came to think, had suggested something new for philosophy to be, just as had, successively, Aristode, Locke and Kant. Each of the latter had created a disciplinary matrix, and thereby

a philosophical tradition - a tradition made up of the people who took the founders' terminology and arguments seriously. In the Kuhnian view, analytic philosophy was a matter of testing the utility of the new model that Carnap and Russell had suggested. The model might prove fruitful, or it might prove to be just one more way of rejuvenating tired old philosophical controversies by phrasing them in a new jargon. Only time could tell. But there was no a priori reason to think that either symbolic logic or the famous 'rigour and clarity' on which the analytic philosophers kept pluming themselves, would payoff. There was no reason to think ofCarnap's and Russell's model for philosophy as 'more scientific' or even more rigorous than Hegel's, HusserI's or Heidegger's. About all that one could say was that their books were easier to understand. This is not to say that Kuhn showed the notion of 'being scientific' to be empty. Like other vague and inspiring ideas, this one can be filled in, and made concrete, in various ways. One way is to ask whether a discipline can offer accurate predictions, and can therefore be helpful for engineering, or medicine, or other practical purposes. Galilean mechanics was good at this, Aristotelian physics not very good at all. Medicine before Harvey offered fewer confirmed predictions than after Harvey. But Kuhn helped us realize that it is poindess to try to explain greater predictive success, in these cases, by saying that Galileo and Harvey were 'more scientific' than Aristode and Galen. Rather, by showing that we can predict more than we had thought we could, these two men helped change the meaning of 'science' in such a way that 'able to make useful predictions' became a more important criterion for 'being an able scientist' than it had been previously. But, in any case, this way of firming up the notion of scientificity is of no use when it comes to philosophy. Philosophers have never predicted anything successfully, and do not try to do so. So, for metaphilosophical purposes, the criterion of scientificity has to be different. The obvious alternative is: ability to get agreement among informed inquirers. The main reason admirers of physics distrust literary critics is that no consensus ever seems to form about the right interpretation of a text: there is little convergence of opinion. At

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the opposite extreme, mathematicians are usually unanimous about whether or not a theorem has been proved. Physicists are closer to the mathematics end of the spectrum, and politicians and social scientists closer to the literary criticism end. Analytic philosophers claimed (not very plausibly, as things turned out) that analytic philosophers were more capable of consensus than non-analytic philosophers, and in that sense were more scientific. The trouble is that intersubjective agreement about who has succeeded and who has failed is easy to get if you can lay down criteria of success in advance. If all you want is fast relief, your choice of analgesic is clear (though the winning drug may have unfortunate, belated side effects). If you know that all you want out of science is accurate prediction, you have a fast way to decide between competing theories (though this criterion by itself would, at one time, have led you to favour Ptolemaic over Copernican astronomy). If you know that all you want is rigorous demonstration, you can check out mathematicians' proofs of theorems and then award the prize to the one who has proved the most (although the award will then always go to a hack, whose theorems are of no interest). But intersubjective agreement is harder to get when the criteria of success begin to proliferate, and even harder when those criteria themselves are up for grabs. So you can always increase the amount of consensus among philosophers by making your philosophizing more scholastic and minute, and decrease it by making your philosophizing more ambitious. Reading Kuhn led me, and many others, to think that instead of mapping culture on to a epistemico-ontological hierarchy topped by the logical, objective and scientific, and bottoming out in the rhetorical, subjective and unscientific, we should instead map culture on to a sociological spectrum ranging from the chaotic left, where criteria are constantly changing, to the smug right, where they are, at least for the moment, fixed. Thinking in terms of such a spectrum makes it possible to see a single discipline moving leftward in revolutionary periods and rightward in stable, dull periods - the sort of periods where you get what Kuhn called 'normal science'. In the fifteenth century, when most philosophy was scholastic and almost all physics contentedly Aristotelian, both

physics and philosophy were pretty far to the right. In the seventeenth, both were pretty far to the left, but literary criticism was much further to the right than it was to become after the Romantic movement. In the nineteenth, physics had settled down and moved right, and philosophy was desperately trying to do so as well. But in the twentieth century, philosophy has had to settle for splitting itself up into separate traditions ('analytic' and 'Continental'), each of which claimed to be 'doing real philosophy', and each of which have fairly clear internal criteria of professional success. In this respect - lack of international consensus about who is doing worthwhile work - it remains much more like contemporary literary criticism than like any of the contemporary natural sciences. This new, Kuhnian sociological view of the relation of the disciplines to one another has made people in many disciples more relaxed about the question of whether they have a rigorous research method, or whether their work produces knowledge rather than mere opinion. Since sociologists began reading Kuhn, for example, it has become easier for them to grant that Weber and Durkheim were great sociologists, even though neither was familiar with the powerful methods of statistical analysis in which sociologists are now trained. This permits them to concede that contemporary sociologists who abstain from statistics (David Riesman and Richard Sennett, for example) might be perfectly respectable members of the profession. To take another example, since psychologists began reading Kuhn, the question of whether Freudian depth psychology is as 'scientifically reputable' as Skinner's work with pigeons has seemed less pressing. Adolf Grunbaum is one of the relatively few philosophers of science to care whether Freud produced testable generalizations. All of the social sciences, and all of the learned professions, have by now gone through a process of Kuhnianization, marked by an increased willingness to admit that there is no single model for good work in an academic discipline, that the criteria for good work have changed throughout the course of history, and probably will continue to change. Though analytic philosophy has been something of a holdout, even there there has been an increased willingness to historicize: to grant that there is no point in dividing the history of

philosophy into sense and nonsense, and to admit that even Hegel and Heidegger might have done useful philosophical work. These post-Kuhnian attempts to substitute a spectrum ranging from the controversial to the noncontroversial for the traditional Platonic hierarchy are, however, still staunchly resisted by two sorts of people. One is the kind of analytic philosopher who prides himself on being a 'realist' and who sees what he calls 'relativism' as a clear and present danger to our culture. Uohn Searle, who has bracketed me with Kuhn and Derrida as one of the more dangerous relativists, is perhaps the most conspicuous example.)l The other is the natural scientist who enjoys his inherited position at the top of an epistemico-ontological hierarchy, and has no intention of being toppled. Such scientists will tell you that 'no real scientist' takes Kuhn seriously. Scientists of this sort think that they know all they need to know about philosophy of science simply by being scientists. They see no need to reflect on the questions that philosophers of science debate, and about which 'realist' philosophers disagree with Davidson, Putnam and Kuhn-disciples like myself. They seem to think that philosophers of science should test their views about the nature of science simply by asking native informants - asking their physicist friends, for example, whether they have finally managed to get physics right. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, is a good example of this way of thinking. Weinberg spoils a recent judicious and sensible article in The New r ark Review if BookS- about the 'Sokal hoax' (a spoof article offering a defence of so-called postmodernist views on the basis of recent developments in physics) by concluding it with the usual scientist's exorcism of Kuhn: None of us who are really at home in the field take Kuhn seriously. Here is a sample of Weinberg doing philosophy of science: What I mean when I say that the laws of physics are real is that they are real in pretty much the same sense (whatever that is) as the rocks in the fields, and not in the same sense (as implied by [Stanley] Fish) as the rules of baseball. We did not create the laws of physics or the rocks in the field, and we sometimes

unhappily find that we have been wrong about them, as when we stub our toe on an unnoticed rock, or when we find we have made a mistake (as most physicists have) about some scientific law. But the languages in which we describe rocks or in which we state physical laws are certainly created socially, so I am making an implicit assumption (which in everyday life we all make about rocks) that the statements about the laws of physics are in a one-to-one correspondence with aspects of objective reality. To put it another way,'if we ever discover intelligent creatures on some distant planet and translate their scientific works, we will find that we and they have discovered the same laws ... The objective nature of scientific knowledge has been denied by Andrew Ross and Bruno Latour and (as I understand them) by the influential philosophers Richard Rorty and the late Thomas Kuhn, but it is taken for granted by most natural scientists. I have come to think that the laws of physics are real because my experience with the laws of physics does not seem to me very different in any fundamental way with my experience with rocks. For those who have not lived with the laws of physics, I can offer the obvious argument that the laws of physics work, and there is no other known way oflooking at nature that works in anything like the same sense. 3 I imagine that Weinberg thinks he is being as sensible and judicious in this concluding portion of his article as in its earlier portions. But he is not. He is just blowing smoke. He is throwing around terms ('objectively real', 'one-to-one correspondence', etc.) that have been the subject of endless philosophical reflection and controversy as ifhe and the common reader knew perfectly well what they meant, and could afford to ignore the pseudo-sophistiCation of the people who have spent their lives trying to figure out what sense, if any, might be given to them. Weinberg treats Kuhn as a mere paradox-mongerer. He feels entitled to do so for no better reason than that, as a physicist, he is the ultimate court of appeal for any philosophical claim about

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the epistemico-ontological status of physical laws. The possibility that Kuhn might have rendered the whole idea of epistemological and ontological status obsolete, and with it the distinction between objective reality and some other kind of reality, does not cross his mind. Earlier in his article Weinberg sensibly remarks that some distinguished scientists draw absolutely fabulous philosophical consequences from what might seem rather limited empirical results. (He mentions Heisenberg and Prigogine; he might also have mentioned Piaget and Eccles.) He rightly rebukes such people for exceeding their briefs, without realizing that that is what he himself is doing. He is assuming that he does not have to learn anything about the context of the discussion to which he thinks he is contributing: he can just charge in and straighten everybody out. He thinks that a physicist, by virtue of being a physicist, knows all that is necessary about the relation of physics to the rest ofculture, and therefore can adjudicate philosophical disputes about its relation to other human activities. Compare Weinberg's testimony to his experience with the laws of physics with a good old-fashioned moral theologian's testimony to his experience with the Will of God. This Will, the theologian tells us, is much more like a great big rock than like the rules of baseball. We did not create the prohibitions against usury and sodomy, though of course we can misinterpret them - an experience that, he assures us, is much like stubbing one's toe against a rock. Having lived with the moral law for a long time, and dealt with it on intimate terms, he is prepared to assure us that there is the same sort of one-to-one correspondence with objective reality in morals as there is in geology. The paradox-mongering speculations of atheistic relativists, he explains, are not taken seriously by anybody who is really at home in the field. Weinberg tells us that all of us, in everyday life, recognize that there is a 'one-to-one correspondence' between what we say about rocks and 'aspects of objective reality'. But ask yourself, common reader, in your capacity as everyday speaker about rocks, whether you recognize anything of the sort. If you do, we philosophers would be grateful for some details. Do both the subject and the predicate of your

sentences about rocks ('This rock is hard to move', say) stand in such a relation of correspondence? Are you sure that hard-to-moveness is really an aspect of olljective reality? It's not hard for some of your neighbours to move, after all. Doesn't that make it an aspect of only sulljective reality? Or is it that the whole sentence stands in one-to-one correspondence to a single aspect of objective reality? Which aspect is that? The rock? Or the rock in its context, as obstacle to your gardening endeavours? What is an 'aspect' anyway? The way something looks in a certain context? Aren't some contexts more objective than others? Maybe it is only the rock as viewed by the particle physicist that is an aspect of objective reality (a view favoured by many eminent 'realist' philosophers)? Maybe the rock under other descriptions than the physicists' gets increasingly non-objective as sentences about it get fancier? Or perhaps all descriptions of the rock are on an epistemico-ontological par (a view favoured by many of us 'relativist' philosophers). And do, while you are at it, tell us more about correspondence, a notion which has given us philosophers a great deal of trouble. Is the relation of correspondence a matter of properly educated humans' ability to utter noncontroversial statements about rocks at a single glance? Is this desirable relation absent in the case of their ability to utter noncontroversial statements about the batter's hits and strikes? Or is the relevant sort of correspondence a causal, physical matter (as Saul Kripke has suggested)? Or is the notion of correspondence so hopeless that it, along with that of 'accurate representation of reality', should be discarded from philosophy altogether (as Donald Davidson has suggested)? I can come up with conundrums like this for a long time, but I suspect that Weinberg would not see the point of my raising any of them. The difference between us is that I am in the philosophy business and he is not. I concoct and hash over conundrums like that for a living. So did Kuhn. If you don't wish to discuss such conundrumsif you don't want to reflect on what you mean by 'objective' and 'corresponds' and 'works' and 'not made by us', and if you imagine that you can explicate 'real' by saying 'you know, like rocks' - you had better not think that you understand the epistemico-ontological

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Kuhn, that 'whether or not individual practitioners are aware of it, they are trained to and rewarded for solving intricate puzzles - be they instrumental, theoretical, logical, or mathematical - at the interface between their phenomenal world and their community's beliefs about it.'5 I would interpret this remark of Kuhn's as applying to all practitioners ofall disciplines: physics as much as jurisprudence, philosophy as much as medicine, psychology as much as architecture. As I read him, Kuhn gave us a way of seeing the history of physics, of philosophy, of the novel, and of parliamentary government, in the same terms: human beings trying to improve on their ancestors' solution to old problems in such a way as to solve some new, recently arisen problems as well. Kuhn suggested that in all these areas we could drop the notion of 'getting closer to the way things really are' or 'more fully grasping the essence of .. .' or 'finding out how it really should be done'. For all these, we can substitute the notion of capitalizing on past successes while at the same time coping with present problems. Kuhn aimed, he once said, to 'deny all meaning to claims that successive scientific beliefs become more and more probable or better and better approximations to the truth and simultaneously to suggest that the subject of truth claims cannot be a relation between beliefs and a putatively mind-independent or "external" world'.6 This suggestion is, admittedly, a shock to common sense, not to mention to the self-esteem of those accustomed to being at the top of the hierarchy of disciplines. But it is the sort of healthy shock that all great philosophers have administered to the common sense of their times. Philosophy is not a field in which one achieves greatness by ratifYing the community's previous intuitions.

status of physical laws better than Kuhn did (even if you happen to have discovered a few of those laws yourself). Kuhn and I may be quite wrong to abandon the traditional Platonic hierarchy of disciplines, but you will not be in a position to know whether we are or not until you have engaged in this sort of reflection. Weinberg's attachment to the traditional Platonic hierarchy is clearest in a passage where he says What Herbert Butterfield called the Whig interpretation of history is legitimate in the history of science in a way that it is not in the history of politics or culture, because science is cumulative, and permits definite judgements of success or failure. 4 Does Weinberg really want to abstain from definite judgements of the success or failure of, say, the constitutional changes brought about by the Reconstruction Amendments and by the New Deal's use of the interstate commerce clause? Does he really want to disagree with those who think that poets and artists stand on the shoulders of their predecessors, and accumulate knowledge about how to write poems and paint pictures? Does he really think that when you write the history of parliamentary democracy or of the novel that you should not, Whiggishly, tell a story of cumulation? Can he suggest what a non-Whiggish, legitimate history of these areas of culture would look like? I doubt that Weinberg has any clearer idea what he means by 'legitimate' and 'definite' and 'cumulative' than of what he means by 'one-to-one correspondence'. But his intent is clear: it is to keep natural science at the top of the cultural pecking order. I hope it is clear that I do not want to assign science a lower position on this pecking order. What I want to do is urge that we stop using terms like 'real' and 'objective' to construct such an order. I want to substitute questions about the utility of disciplines for questions about their status. It seems to me as silly to try to establish a hierarchy among disciplines, or cultural activities, as to establish one among the tools in a toolbox, or among the flowers in a garden. For my anti-hierarchical purposes, I find it helpful to say, with

i:

So much for my protest against Weinberg's attempt to dismiss Kuhn as somebody who lacked sufficiently intimate contact with the laws of physics. But I should end by making an embarrassing admission: Kuhn would have been embarrassed by my defence of him. Kuhn thought physicists were wonderfol, and was dubious about philosophers like me (the only marginally 'analytical' kind - the kind with a lot of literary interests, a fondness for metaphor, and other

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symptoms of intellectual squishiness). Not only were many of his heroes Nobel laureates in physics, but the more 'clear and rigorous' a philosopher was (the more he sounded like Carnap, roughly speaking), the better Kuhn liked him. As one of his obituaries accurately noted, Kuhn usually preferred his critics to his fans. In interviews Kuhn took pains to distance himself from 'Rorty's relativism', and from the writings of various other fans who had tried to weave Kuhnian doctrines into the fabric of philosophical positions that Kuhn found unattractive. But, even though we were colleagues for some 15 years, I never got straight why Kuhn thought I was more 'relativistic' than he was, or where exactly he thought I went off the rails. I always hoped that when he published the book on which he was working in the last decade of his life - a return to the controversies raised by Structure - I would be able to cite chapter and verse to show him that we had been preaching pretty much the same doctrine. I tend to explain away the fact that Kuhn found my enthusiasm for his work embarrassing by the thought that he sometimes confused criticism of the purportedly exalted epistemico-ontological status of physics with criticism ofits aesthetic and moral grandeur. I too acknowledge this grandeur. I am happy to agree with C. P. Snow that modem physics is one of the most beautiful achievements of the human mind. I am happy, but not surprised, to be told by Weinberg that his is still a field in which unknown young people are making the big contributions - a field in which the author of a single paper can acquire an instant international reputation, a reputation that has nothing to do with academic politics, but is simply the prompt and proper reward for sheer brilliance. I think that Kuhn was so impressed by this moral and aesthetic grandeur that he thought that any attempt to dismantle the old Platonic hierarchy should be accompanied by appropriate gestures of respect toward natural science - traditional gestures that I sometimes did not bother to make. He may have had a point. But I would still insist that getting rid ofthe old quasi-Platonic pecking order, and thereby creating an intellectual environment in which eminent scientists will no longer be tempted to indulge in rocky rhetoric such as Weinberg's, is a very useful project. Kuhn was one of the most influential philosophers of

our century because he did as much as anyone else - even Wittgenstein - to get this useful work done.

* * * * NOTES See my reply to Searle's 'Rationality and Realism: What is at Stake?', reprinted as John Searle on Realism and Relativism' in my Truth and Progress. 2 Steven Weinberg, 'Sokal's Hoax', New York Review rif Books (August 1996), vol. VIII, pp. II-IS. 3 Weinberg, pp. 14-15. 4 Weinberg, p. IS· 5 Thomas Kuhn, 'Afterwords' in World Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature rif Science, Paul Horwich, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, (993), p. 338. 6 Kuhn, p. 330. I

13. On Heidegger's Nazism (1990 )

Heidegger's writings - both early and late - are full of polemics against the appearance-reality distinction. In the early work, this polemic centres upon a Dewey-like insistence on the priority of Welt to Wirklich!ceit, of the Zuhanden to the Vorhanden, and of Auslegung to Aussage. If one reads paragraphs 31-3 of Being and lime as I should like to, and as Mark Okrent has in his book Heidegger's Pragmatism, Heidegger will be seen as making theory an instrument of practice, as construing assertions as tools for the accomplishment of some human project. Even in the later work, where Heidegger treats pragmatism as a banal variety of Nietzschean nihilism, he still insists over and over that the Greek appearance-reality distinction is symptomatic of the West's metaphysical way of speaking Being. Indeed, he sometimes traces the pragmatism of our time - its technological understanding of Being back to that distinction. Yet Heidegger himself, in his own rhetorical practice, clings to the very appearance-reality distinction that he repudiates in theory. In Being and T!me he constantly describes himself as excavating down to conditions of possibility deeper than those discerned by his predecessors. In his later works he is always telling us that every contemporary understanding of our historical situation other than his own is shallow - that it is unable to penetrate to the essence of technology, and instead gets hung up on superficial questions like nuclear holocaust. In these writings, Heidegger refuses to think of himself as one more finite and contingent bit of Dasein assembling tools for the accomplishment of various finite projects. Rather, he wants to see himself as projectless, will-less, a mere open ear, a conduit for the voice of Being. Those who, like myself, have taken more from the early pragmatist

Heidegger than from the later listener to the voice of Being, are very suspicious of this project of becoming projectless. It seems to us that as Heidegger grew older he drew back from the insistence on finitude that dominated Being and lime. We see this as regression. We have to admit that Heidegger became a more original and more interesting thinker as he grew older and more megalomaniacal, but we regard this is as one more example of passionate and idiosyncratic error being more instructive than sober and useful truth. So for us Heidegger's writings are not a conduit through which we can hear the voice of Being. Rather, they are a toolbox. They are the receptacle in which Heidegger deposited the tools that he invented at various times to accomplish one or another project. These projects were varied, and sometimes got in each other's way. Early on, Heidegger wanted to revive Aristotle in order to follow through on the neo-Thomist criticism of Descartes. Later he wanted to go beyond Nietzsche by going back behind Aristotle. Sometimes he wanted to describe Dasein in general, and at other times to describe only twentieth-century Dasein. Once he wanted to be the heroic leader of a national movement, but later he wanted to be the wise old hermit who knew that 'only a God can save us'. His suggestion that he always followed a single star seems to me self-deceptive self-flattery. I see the toolbox we have inherited from him as containing a very varied assortment, constructed for various different purposes - an assortment in which only some items are still useful. I think that the best tribute we can pay to Heidegger's achievements is to be selective about what we take from him. For myself, I should like to keep the pragmatist and ignore the Nazi, keep the plot outline of Heidegger's history of metaphysics while rewriting its downbeat ending, keep selected items of Heidegger's imagery and jargon while shrugging off his worldhistorical pretensions. Heidegger would have been exasperated with this way ofappropriating him. But so are his most implacable critics. These critics claim that his Nazism was not just one facet of his thought, just one of his various projects, but rather a vital clue to the underlying essence of his thought. They insist that his thought is just as tightly unified as he believed it to have been. They think that there is an underlying reality

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beneath the diverse appearances, that he really was following a single star - a dark, evil star. For these critics, Heidegger is not just a collection of projects, soIDe good and some bad. For they have the same essentialist attitude toward Heidegger as Heidegger had toward the twentieth century. Heidegger needed to see everything in our century other than its technologism as mere transitory appearance. The critics I have in mind need to see everything in Heidegger other than his antiegalitarianism and devotion to the Fiihrerprinzip as superficial. By contrast, we pragmatists see the twentieth century as a mixed bag of good news and bad news, and Heidegger's work as a toolbox containing some splendid things lying next to a lot of outdated junk. For those of us who wish to continue to pick over the tools in Heidegger's box, the fact that the man who designed these remarkable tools was first a Nazi and later a cowardly hypocrite is just one of history's many ironies. We wish the fact were otherwise. We have the same wistfulness about other thinkers whom we admire. We wish that Carnap had listened to Sidney Hook's good advice and not stooged for Stalin by sponsoring the I948 Waldorf Peace Conference. We wish that Sartre had not waited until I956 to break with the party line. We wish that Yeats and Shaw had not enthused over Mussolini before finding out what was happening to his political prisoners. We wish that the New Left of the I960s had not enthused over Castro and Mao before finding but what was happening to their political prisoners. But we regard the political initiatives of these premature enthusiasts as largely irrelevant to their intellectual legacies. This claim of irrelevance is not acceptable to critics who would like Heidegger to remain a pariah. They see the rectorial address as a glimpse of the real, the essential Heidegger, whereas I do not believe that there is such a thing as the essential Heidegger. I think that these critics are right only to the following extent: Heidegger was antiegalitarian throughout his life, and never cared in the slightest for the liberal project of increasing the sum of human happiness. But I doubt that this antiegalitarianism would seem very important to his readers, would seem an index to the real, true, essential Heidegger, if it were not for Heidegger's silence about the massacre of the Jews.

For this silence is what makes Heidegger's case different from that of Carnap or Sartre. Carnap and Sartre were judging political events in Russia and central Europe at a distance. But Heidegger watched his Jewish colleagues being dismissed from their jobs, and then watched them disappear to a fate about which he could easily have learned if he had thought it worth the trouble. That silence is also what makes Heidegger different from the general run of antiegalitarians. Many eminent twentieth-century writers have mistrusted democracy, but he was the only one to have remained unmoved by the Holocaust. I think that Habermas and Derrida are right in saying that any of us might, given Heidegger's background, have thought that Hider was Germany's only hope in I933. They are right in saying that the really unforgivable thing is the postwar silence. I agree that this silence was unforgivable, but I am unable to deduce this silence from the content of Heidegger's books, or even to see it as a sign of something that should make us suspicious of those books. This is because I take a person's moral character - his or her selective sensitivity to the sufferings of others - to be shaped by chance events in his or her life. Often, perhaps usually, this sensitivity varies independendy of the projects of self-creation that the person undertakes in his or her work. I can clarify what I mean by 'chance events' and 'independent variation' by sketching a slighdy different possible world - a world in which Heidegger joins his fellow antiegalitarian, Thomas Mann, in preaching resistance to Hider. To see how this possible world might have been actual, imagine that in the summer of I930 Heidegger suddenly finds himself deeply in love with a beautiful, intense, adoring philosophy student named Sarah Mandelbaum. Sarah is Jewish, but Heidegger barely notices this, dizzy with passion as he is. After a painful divorce from Elfride - a process that costs him the friendship of, among other people, the Husserls - Heidegger marries Sarah in I932. In January I933 they have a son, Abraham. Heidegger jokes that Sarah can think of Abraham as named after the patriarch, but that he will think of him as named after Abraham a Santa Clara, the only other Messkirch boy to make good. Sarah looks up Abraham a Santa Clara's anti-Semitic writings in the library stacks, and Heidegger's little joke becomes the occasion of the first

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serious quarrel between husband and wife. But by the end of 1933, Heidegger is no longer making such jokes. For Sarah makes him notice that theJewish Beamte, including his father-in-law, have been cashiered. Heidegger reads things about himself in the student newspaper that make him realize that his day in the sun may be over. Gradually it dawns upon him that his love for Sarah has cost him much of his prestige, and will sooner or later cost him his job. But he still loves her, and eventually he leaves his beloved Freiburg for her sake. In 1935 Heidegger is teaching in Berne, but only as a visitor. Switzerland has by now given away all its philosophy chairs. Suddenly a call comes from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. There Heidegger spends two years slowly and painfully learning English, aching for the chance once again to spellbind seminar rooms full of worshipfully attentive students. He gets a chance to do so in 1937 when some of his fellow emigres arrange a permanent job for him at the University of Chicago. There he meets Elizabeth Mann Borgese, who introduces him to her father. Heidegger manages to overcome his initial suspicion of the Hanseatic darling of fortune, and Mann his initial suspicion of the Black Forest Bauernkind. They find they agree with each other, and with Adorno and Horkheimer; that America is a reductio ad absurdum of Enlightenment hopes, a land without culture. But their contempt for America does not prevent them from seeing Hider as having ruined Germany and being about to ruin Europe. Heidegger's stirring anti-Nazi broadcasts enable him to gratifY a need to strike a heroic attitude before large masses of people - a need that he might, under other circumstances, have gratified in a rectorial address. By the end of the Second World War, Heidegger's marriage is on the rocks. Sarah Heidegger is a social democrat to the core, loves America, and is a passionate zionist. She has come to think ofHeidegger as a great man with a cold and impervious heart, a heart which had once opened to her but remains closed to her social hopes. She has come to despise the egotist as. much as she admires the philosopher and the anti-Nazi polemicist. In 1947 she separates from Heidegger and takes the 14-year-old Abraham with her to Palestine. She is wounded in the civil war but eventually, after the proclamation of

independence, becomes a philosophy professor at Tel Aviv University. Heidegger himself returns to Freiburg in triumph in 1948. There he gets his old friend Gadamer a job, even though he is acidly contemptuous of Gadamer's acquiescence in the Nazi takeover of the German universities. He eventually takes as his third wife a war widow, a woman who reminds all his old friends of Elfride. When he dies in 1976, his wife lays on his coffin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the medal of the order Pour Ie Mente, and the gold medal of the Nobel Prize for Literature. This last had been awarded him in the year after the publication of his brief but poignant elegy for Abraham, who had died on the Golan Heights in 1967. What books did Heidegger write in this possible world? Almost exacdy the same ones as he wrote in the actual one. In this world, however, the Introduction to Metaphysics contains a contemptuous identification of the National Socialist movement with the mindless nihilism of modern technology, as well as the remark that Hider is dragging Germany down to the metaphysical level of Russia and America. The seminars on Nietzsche are much the same as those he gave in our world, except for a digression on Nietzsche's loathing for anti-Semites, a digression that contains uncanny parallels to Sartre's contemporaneous but independent Portrait qf the Anti-Semite. In this world, Heidegger writes most of the same exegetical essays he wrote in our world, but he adds appreciations of Thoreau and of Jefferson, composed for lectures at Harvard and at the University of Virginia respectively. These two essays evince Heidegger's familiar sentimental agrarianism and suspicion of the urban proletariat. His books in this world are, in short, documents of the same struggle he carried on in the actual world - the struggle to move outside the philosophical tradition and there 'sing a new song'. This struggle, this private pursuit of purity, was the core of his life. It was incapable of being gready influenced either by his love for particular persons or by the political events of his time. In our world, Heidegger said nothing political after the war. In the possible world I am sketching he puts his prestige as an anti-Nazi to work in making the German political right respectable. He is adored by Franz Josef Strauss, who pays regular and worshipful visits to

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Todtnauberg. Occasionally Heidegger appears with Strauss at political rallies. Social Democrats like Habermas regret Heidegger's being consistendy on the wrong side in postwar German politics. Sometimes, in private, they voice the suspicion that, in slighdy different circumstances, Heidegger would have made a pretty good Nazi. But they never dream of saying such a thing in public about the greatest European thinker of our time. In our actual world Heidegger was a Nazi, a cowardly hypocrite, and the greatest European thinker of our time. In the possible world I have sketched he was pretty much the same man, but he happened to have his nose rubbed in the torment of the Jews until he finally noticed what was going on, until his sense of pity and his sense of shame were finally awakened. In that world he had the good luck to have been unable to have become a Nazi, and so to have had less occasion for cowardice or hypocrisy. In our actual world, he turned his face away, and eventually resorted to hysterical denial. This denial brought on his unforgivable silence. But that denial and that silence do not tell us much about the books he wrote, nor conversely. In both worlds, the only link between Heidegger's politics and his books is the contempt for democracy he shared with, for example, Eliot, Chesterton, Tate, Waugh and Paul Claudel - people whom, as Auden predicted, we have long since pardoned for writing well. We could as easily have pardoned Heidegger his attitude towards democracy, if that had been all. But in the world without Sarah, the world in which Heidegger had the bad luck to live, it was not all. To sum up: I have been urging that we can find in the early Heidegger's pragmatic antiessentialism reasons for abandoning the attempt to see the man and the books in a single vision, and perhaps even the attempt to see the books as stages on a single Denkweg. If we take that antiessentialism more seriously than Heidegger himself proved able to take it, we shall not be tempted to dramatize Heidegger in the way in which he dramatized his favourite thinkers and poets. We shall not assign thinkers and poets places in a world-historical narrative. We shall· see both them and their books as vector sums of contingent pressures. We shall see Heidegger as one more confused, torn, occasionally desperate, human being, someone much like our-

selves. We shall read Heidegger's books as he least wanted them read - as occasions for exploitation, recent additions to our Bestand an Waren. We shall stop yearning for depth, and stop trying either to worship heroes or to hunt down criminals. Instead, we shall setde for useful tools, and take them where we can find them.

14. Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes (1998)

Failed prophecies often make invaluable inspirational reading. Consider two examples: the New Testament and the Communist Manifesto. Both were intended by their authors as predictions of what was going to happen - predictions based on superior knowledge of the forces which determine human history. Both sets of predictions have, so far, been ludicrous flops. Both claims to knowledge have become objects of ridicule. Christ did not return. Those who claim that He is about to do so, and that it would be prudent to become a member of a particular sect or denomination in order to prepare for this event, are rightly viewed with suspicion. To be sure, nobody can prove that the Second Coming will not occur, thus producing empirical evidence for the Incarnation. But we have been waiting a long time. Analogously, nobody can prove that Marx and Engels were wrong when they proclaimed that 'the bourgeoisie has forged the weapons that bring death to itself'. It may be that the globalization of the labour market in the next century will reverse the progressive bourgeoisization of the European and North American proletariat, and that it will become true that 'the bourgeoisie is incapable of continuing to rule, since it is unable even to assure an existence to the slaves within their slavery'. Maybe the breakdown of capitalism, and the assumption of the political power by a virtuous and enlightened proletariat, will then come to pass. Maybe, in short, Marx and Engels just got the timing a century or two wrong. Still, capitalism has overcome many crises in the past, and we have been waiting a long time for the emergence of this proletariat. Again, no scoffer can be sure that what evangelical Christians call

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'becoming a New Being in ChristJesus' is not a genuinely transformative, miraculous experience. But those who claim to have been reborn in this way do not seem to behave as differendy from the way they behaved in the past as we had hoped. We have been waiting a long time for prosperous Christians to behave more decendy than prosperous pagans. Analogously, we cannot be sure but that some day we may catch sight of new ideals which will replace those that Marx and Engels dismissively called 'bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom'. But we have waited patiendy for regimes calling themselves 'Marxist' to explain to us exacdy what these new ideals look like, and how they are to be realized in practice. So far, all such regimes have turned out to be throwbacks to pre-Enlightenment barbarism rather than the first glimmerings of a post-Enlightenment utopia. There are, to be sure, still people who read the Christian Scriptures in order to figure out what is likely to happen a few years or decades down the road. Ronald Reagan did, for example. Up until quite recendy, many intellectuals read the Communist Manifesto for the same purpose. Just as the Christians have counselled patience, and assured us that it is unfair to judge Christ by the mistakes of his sinful servants, so the Marxists have assured us that all the 'Marxist' regimes so far have been absurd perversions of Marx's intent. The few surviving Marxists now admit that the Communist parties of Lenin, Mao and Castro bore no resemblance to the empowered proletariat of Marx's dreams, but were merely the tools ofautocrats and oligarchs. Nevertheless, they tell us, some day there will be a genuinely revolutionary, genuinely proletarian, party - a party whose triumph will bring us a freedom as unlike 'bourgeois freedom' as the Christian doctrine that love is the only law is unlike the arbitrary dictates of Leviticus. Most of us can no longer take either Christian or Marxist postponements and reassurances seriously. But this does-not, and should not, prevent us from finding inspiration and encouragement in the New Testament and the Manifesto. For both documents are expressions of the same hope: that some day we shall be willing and able to treat the needs of all human beings with the respect and consideration with

which we treat the needs of those closest to us, those whom we love. Both texts have gathered greater inspirational power as the years have passed. For each is the founding document of a movement which has done much for human freedom and human equality. By this time, thanks to the rise in population since 1848, both may have inspired equal numbers of brave and self-sacrificing men and women to risk their lives and fortunes in order to prevent future generations from enduring needless suffering. There may already have been as many socialist martyrs as Christian martyrs. If human hope can survive the anthrax-laden warheads, the suitcase-sized nuclear devices, the overpopulation, the globalized labour market, and the environmental disasters of the coming century, if we have descendants who, a century from now, still have a historical record to consult and are still able to seek inspiration from the past, perhaps they will think of Saint Agnes and Rosa Luxemburg, Saint Francis and Eugene Debs, Father Damien andJeanJaures, as members of a single movement. Just as the New Testament is still read by millions of people who spend litde time wondering whether Christ will some day return in glory, so the Communist Manifesto is still read even by those of us who hope and believe that full social justice can be attained without a revolution of the sort Marx predicted: that a classless society, a world in which 'the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all' can come about as a result of what Marx despised as 'bourgeois reformism'. Parents and teachers should encourage young people to read both books. The young will be morally better for having done so. We should raise our children to find it intolerable that we who sit behind desks and punch keyboards are paid ten times as much as people who get their hands dirty cleaning our toilets, and a hundred times as much as those who fabricate our keyboards in the Third W orld. We should ensure that they worry about the fact that the countries which industrialized first have a hundred times the wealth of those which have not yet industrialized. Our children need to learn, early on, to see the inequalities between their own fortunes and those of other children as neither the Will of God nor the necessary price for economic efficiency, but as an evitable tragedy. They should start

thinking, as early as possible, about how the world might be changed so as to ensure that no one goes hungry while others have a surfeit. The children need to read Christ's message of human fraternity alongside Marx and Engel's account of how industrial capitalism and free markets - indispensable as they have turned out to be - make it very difficult to institute that fraternity. They need to see their lives as given meaning by efforts towards the realization of the moral potential inherent in our ability to communicate our needs and our hopes to one another. They should learn stories both about Christian congregations meeting in the catacombs and about workers' rallies in city squares. For both have played equally important roles in the long process of actualizing this potentiality. The inspirational value of the New Testament and the Communist Manifesto is not diminished by the fact that many millions of people were enslaved, tortured or starved to death by sincere, morally earnest people who recited passages from one or the other text in order to justifY their deeds. Memories of the dungeons of the Inquisition and the interrogation rooms of the KGB, of the ruthless greed and arrogance ofthe Christian clergy and of the Communist nomenklatura, should indeed make us reluctant to hand over power to people who claim to know what God, or History, wants. But there is a difference between knowledge and hope. Hope often takes the form of false prediction, as it did in both documents. But hope for social justice is nevertheless the only basis for a worthwhile human life. Christianity and Marxism still have the power to do a great deal of harm, for both the New Testament and the Communist Manifesto can still be effectively quoted by moral hypocrites and egomaniacal gangsters. In the US, for example, an organization called the Christian Coalition holds the Republican Party (and thus Congress) in its thrall. The leaders of this movement have convinced millions of voters that taxing the suburbs to help the ghettos is an unChristian thing to do. In the name of 'Christian family values', the Coalition teaches that for the US government to give a helping hand to the children of unemployable and unwed teenage mothers would 'undermine individual responsibility'. The Coalition's activities are less violent than those of the now-

moribund Sendero Luminoso movement in Peru. But the results of its work are equally destructive. Sendero Luminoso, in its murderous heyday, was headed by a crazed philosophy teacher who thought of himselfas the successor ofLenin and Mao, as an inspired contemporary interpreter of the writings of Marx. The Christian Coalition is headed by a sanctimonious televangelist: the Reverend Pat Robertson - a contemporary interpreter of the Gospels who will probably cause much more suffering in the United States than Abiel Guzman managed to cause in Peru. To sum up: it is best, when reading both the Communist Manifesto and the New Testament, to ignore prophets who claim to be the authorized interpreters of one or the other text. When reading the texts themselves, we should skip lightly past the predictions, and concentrate on the expressions of hope. We should read both as inspirational documents, appeals to what Lincoln called 'the better angels of our nature', rather than as accurate accounts of human history or of human destiny. If one treats the term 'Christianity' as the name of one such appeal, rather than as a claim to knowledge, then that word still names a powerful force working for human decency and human equality. 'Socialism', similarly considered, is the name of the same force an updated, more precise name. 'Christian Socialism' is pleonastic: nowadays you cannot hope for the fraternity which the Gospels preach without hoping that democratic governments will redistribute money and opportunity in a way that the market never will. There is no way to take the New Testament seriously as a moral imperative, rather than as a prophecy, without taking the need for such redistribution equally seriously. Dated as the Communist Manifesto is, it is still an admirable statement of the great lesson we learned from watching industrial capitalism in action; that the overthrow of authoritarian governments, and the achievement of constitutional democracy, is not enough to ensure human equality or human decency. It is as true as it was in r848 that the rich will always try to get richer by making the poor poorer, that total commodification oflabour will lead to the immizeration of the wage-earners, and that 'the executive of the modern state

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is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie' . The bourgeoisie-proletariat distinction may by now be as outdated as the pagan-Christian distinction, but if one substitutes 'the richest 20 per cent' for 'the bourgeoisie' and 'the other 80 per cent' for 'the proletariat', most of the sentences of the Manifesto will still ring true. (Admittedly, however, they ring slightly less true in fully developed welfare states like Germany and slightly more true in countries like the US, in which greed has retained the upper hand, and in which the welfare state has remained rudimentary.) To say that history is 'the history of class struggle' is still true, if it is interpreted to mean that in every culture, under every form of government, and in every imaginable situation (e.g., England when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, Indonesia after the Dutch went home, China after Mao's death, Britain and America under Thatcher and Reagan) the people who have already got their hands on money and power will lie, cheat and steal in order to make sure that they and their descendants monopolize both for ever. Insofar as history presents a moral spectacle, it is the struggle to break such monopolies. The use of Christian doctrine to argue for the abolition ofslavery (and to argue against the American equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws - the racial segregation statutes) shows Christianity at its best. The use of Marxist doctrine to raise the consciousness of workers - to make it clear to them how they are being cheated shows Marxism at its best. When the two have coalesced, as they did in the 'Social Gospel' movement, in the theologies of Paul Tillich and Walter Rauschenbusch, and in the most socialistic of the papal encyclicals, they have enabled the struggle for social justice to transcend the controversies between theists and atheists. Those controversies should be transcended: we should read the New Testament as saying that how we treat each other on earth matters a great deal more than the outcome of debate concerning the existence or nature of another world. The trade union movement, which Marx and Engels thought of as only a transition to the establishment of revolutionary political parties, has turned out to be the most inspiring embodiment of the Christian

virtues of self-sacrifice and of fraternal agape in recorded history. The rise of the trade unions is, morally speaking, the most encouraging development of modern times. It witnessed the purest and most unselfish heroism. Though many trade unions have become corrupt, and many others have ossified, the moral stature of the unions towers above that of the churches and the corporations, the governments and the universities. For the unions were founded by men and women who had an enormous amount to lose - they risked losing the chance of work altogether, the chance to bring food home to their families. They took that risk for the sake of a better human future. We are all deeply in their debt. The organizations they founded are sanctified by their sacrifices. The Manifesto inspired the founders of most of the great unions of modern times. By quoting its words, the founders of the unions were able to bring millions of people out on strike against degrading conditions and starvation wages. Those words buttressed the faith of the strikers that their sacrifice - their willingness to see their children go without sufficient food rather than to yield to the owners' demand for a higher return on investment - would not be in vain. A document which has accomplished that much will always remain among the treasures of our intellectual and spiritual heritage. For the Manifesto spelled out what the workers were gradually coming to realize: that 'instead of rising with the progress of industry', the worker was in danger of'sinking deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class'. This danger was avoided, at least temporarily, in Europe and North America thanks to the courage of workers who had read the Manifesto and who, as a result, were emboldened to demand their share of political power. Had they waited for the Christian kindness and charity of their superiors, their children would still be illiterate and badly fed. The words of the Gospels and of the Manifesto may have provided equal quantities ofcourage and inspiration. But there are many respects in which the Manifesto is a better book to give to the young than the New Testament. For the latter document is morally flawed by its otherworldliness, by its suggestion that we can separate the question

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of our individual relation to God - our individual chance for salvation - from our participation in cooperative efforts to end needless suffering. Many passages in the Gospels have suggested to slave owners that they can keep right on lashing their slaves, and to rich people that they can keep right on starving the poor. For they are going to Heaven anyway, their sins having been forgiven as a result of having accepted Christ as Lord. The New Testament, a document of the ancient world, accepts one of the central convictions of the Greek philosophers who urge that contemplation of universal truths is the ideal life for a human being. This conviction is based on the premise that the social conditions of human life will never change in any important respect: we shall always have the poor with us - and perhaps the slaves as well. This conviction leads the writers of the New Testament to tum their attention from the possibility of a better human future to the hope of pie in the sky when we die. The only utopia these writers can imagine is in another world altogether. We modems are ~:uperior to the ancients - both pagan and Christian - in our ability to imagine a utopia here on earth. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed, in Europe and North America, a massive shift in the locus of human hope: a shift from eternity to future time, from speculation about how to win divine favour to planning for the happiness of future generations. This sense that the human future can be made different from the human past, unaided by nonhuman powers, is magnificently expressed in the Manifesto. It would be best, of course, if we could find a new document to provide our children with inspiration and hope - one which was as free of the defects of the New Testament as of those of the Manifesto. It would be good to have a reformist text, one which lacked the apocalyptic character ofboth books - which did not say that all things must be made new, or that justice 'can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions'. It would be well to have a document which spelled out the details of a this-worldly utopia without assuring us that this utopia will emerge full-blown, and quickly, as soon as some single decisive change has occurred - as soon as private property is abolished, or as soon as we have all takenJesus into our hearts.

It would be best, in short, if we could get along without prophecy and claims to knowledge of the forces which determine history - if generous hope could sustain itself without such reassurances. Some day perhaps we shall have a new text to give to our children - one which abstains from prediction yet still expresses the same yearning for fraternity as does the New Testament, and is as filled with sharp-eyed descriptions of our most recent forms of inhumanity to each other as the Manifesto. But in the meantime we should be grateful for two texts which have helped make us better - have helped us overcome, to some degree, our brutish selfishness and our cultivated sadism.

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15. A Spectre is Haunting the Intellectuals: Derrida on Marx Suppose that Nietzsche had been much more central to the rhetoric of Nazism than he actually was. Suppose also that the Third Reich, after having conquered Britain and Russia, had lasted quite a while, breaking up only in 1989. For 55 years, every European who wanted to get ahead in the world had to join the Nazi Party. Everybody who joined the Nazi Party had to take a lot of boring courses in philosophy - the philosophy of Nietzscheanism-Hiderism - taught by bored, third-rate hacks. One imagines that, after the breakup of the Reich, these Europeans would have wanted to give Nietzsche a rest. People in eastern and central Europe tend to feel this way about Marx. They have heard a lot about Marx for many decades, and would like, at least for a while, not to hear any more. Those among them who have read Kolakowski suspect that the last eight pages of his Main Cu"ents qfMarxism tell you pretty much all you will ever need to know about Marx and Marxism-Leninism. If one reminds Czech or Ukrainian intellectuals that Marx was a remarkably original thinker, that he conjoined an extraordinarily vivid imagination with a very sharp eye for who was doing what to whom, and that he may haunt European thought for centuries, they are likely to shrug their shoulders. They react just as people who had had to pass exams on Nietzscheanism-Hiderism would react to equally plausible praise of Nietzsche. You get similar shrugs at the mention of Marx from a lot of anglophones who never studied him very hard when they were young, and are not inclined to start now. I am one such. Until I was 40 or so, I still solemnly swore that some time (next summer, maybe) I would finally get around to finishing Kapital, Aquinas's Summa Theologica, and Richardson's Pamela. But as the usual middle-aged realization of the

shortness onife came over me, I let the obligation to finish these books slide gendy off my back. So in this respect I am not the best reviewer ofDerrida's Specters qfMarx. 1 There is a lot of Marx I have never read, and am no longer ambitious to read. American leftists of my generation tend to think of Marx as having explained the injustices produced by nineteenth-century capitalism better than anyone else. But we regret that he mixed up sharp-eyed economic and political analysis with a lot of windy Hegelisms. We think it a pity that the best political economist of the nineteenth century happened to major in philosophy, and never quite got over it. Like Sidney Hook, we suspect that Dewey filtered out everything that was worth saving in Hegel, and that all Marx adds to Dewey, Weber and the other philosophers of social democracy are some pungent details about exacdy how the rich manage to keep the poor impotent, and some helpful hints for debunking the hypocrisy of defenders of the status quo. So a typical anglophone reaction to Althusser's claim that Marx discovered a new science was stark incredulity. We anglophones had the same reaction to Sartre's claim that existentialism is just an enclave within Marxism. One Marxisant response to the weariness of the Czechs and Ukrainians, and to the happy-go-lucky pragmatism of anglophones like myself, is to urge, as Derrida parodically puts it, that Marx 'doesn't belong to the communists, to the parties, he ought to figure within our great canon of Western political philosophy. Return to Marx, let's finally read him as a great philosopher.'2 Derrida spurns this response, and urges that we 'avoid the neutralizing anaesthesia of a new theoreticism, and . . . prevent a philosophical-philological return to Marx from prevailing'. 3 For Derrida, the neutralizing anaesthesia of a new theoreticism is what you will get if you read someone who has the ability to move us beyond the present limits of our imagination, or our will, as ifhe were merely giving new answers to old questions. Marx is, for him, too important to be made into a scientist, a solver ofpolitical or philosophical problems. Derrida associates himself with Blanchot's criticism of Althusser's reading of Marx, and with Blanchot's remark that 'neither science nor thinking emerges from Marx's work intact'.+ He reads

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Marx as a fellow romantic idealist, not as the discoverer of a set of true propositions. So he warns us against the danger of 'play[ing] Marx off against Marxism so as to neutralize, or at any rate muffle the political imperative in the untroubled exegesis of a classical text'. 5 Derrida took Marx very seriously indeed when he was young, read lots and lots of him, and remembers him, as he remembers Shakespeare, with affection and gratitude. Derrida is famous not only for a fabulous memory but for a splendidly warm, deeply sentimental sense ofloyalty.6 If a person or a book once meant something to him, once made a contribution to his becoming what he is, he is not about to let that person or book down. His fierce loyalty to the memory of a~fu~~~w~a~~~~w~u~

utterly baffling) essay ('Like the Sound of a Shell Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War') in reaction to the denunciation of de Man's early anti-Semitic articles. His great indebtedness to Heidegger's books has led him to write about them over and over again, each time with increased sensitivity and delicacy. He has written almost nothing about Marx until now, but he more than makes up for this in Specters ifMarx. What is most important about Marx for Derrida is that he reminds us of the possibility ofjustice. Justice', in Derrida's writing, has a very special role. It is his name for the ultimate romantic hope, the Great Undeconstructable, the only thing we should not allow ourselves to be ironic about. The thought of justice, the thought of what Derrida sometimes calls 'the democracy that is to come', haunts Europe. That haunting is the best thing about Europe, the reason why Eurocentrism remains attractive. If, like Derrida, you take Marx as Europe's most notable exemplar of the longing for justice, it is plausible to say that It will always be a fault not to read and reread Marx ... It will be more and more a fault, a failing of theoretical, philosophical and political responsibility . . . Not without Marx, no future without Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx: in any case of a certain Marx, of his genius, of at least one of his spirits. 7 The function of the phrases 'a certain Marx' and 'at least one of his spirits' is to permit Derrida to forget about anything he doesn't like

in Marx - just as we forget, if we are wise, everything about our early lovers which might diminish the memories of our loves. By saying that there are many Marxes, and then leaving most of them aside, he can preserve 'Marx' as a quasi-synonym of 'justice', and thus can (almost) get away with saying 'this gesture of fidelity to a certain spirit of Marxism is a responsibility incumbent, to be sure, on anyone'.8 If the final cause of Specters if Marx is justice, its material cause is the intertwined uses of words like 'spirit', 'spook', 'ghost', 'spectre', 'genius', 'haunt' and the like. Early in the book Derrida says: If! am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presendy living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice. Of justice where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights. 9 Justice, in other words, is what the metaphysics of presence keeps trying and failing to identity with some set of institutions or principles. Such identification is impossible, because every institution or principle will produce new, unexpected, injustices of its own. Every imaginable utopia will need a social protest movement. Justice is a ghost that can never be laid. So, in the course of his attempt to remind us once again of what is best about Marx and Europe, Derrida takes us back and forth between the perturbed spirit of Hamlet's father (a Spuk, a ghost) and the word Geist ('spirit' -like Geschlecht, one of the words whose absence, according to Derrida, haunts the text of Heidegger); between the use of Gespenst ('spectre') in the opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto and the use of 'Ghost' in 'Holy Ghost'; between the German spuckm ('to spit, to vomit') and the German for 'to haunt' (spuken). 'The semantics of Gespensf, Derrida says, 'haunt the semantics of Geisf. 10 In that remark, as in much of the rest of the book, we see Derrida doing one of the things he does best: revitalizing worn-out philosophical terms by mating them with sexier, less jaded partners. Much as I admire Derrida's skill at arranging fruitful miscegenation

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of this sort, as well as the intensity of his hope for justice, I still am not sure why he thinks that Marx is a particularly notable example of this hope. I am not sure that his loyalty to Marx, and his insistence that everybody else join him in not forgetting Marx, testifies to more than the memory of a significant, but accidental, youthful encounter. Certainly the history of European socialism, over the course of 200 or so years, is the biggest and best example of the hope for justice working itself out in practice. But there is a difference between that history and Marx. I agree with Kolakowski when he says The apocalyptic belief in the consummation of history, the inevitability of socialism, and the natural sequence of 'social formations'; the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', the exaltation ofviolence, faith in the automatic effect of nationalizing industry, fantasies concerning a society without conflict and an economy without money - all these have nothing in common with the idea of democratic socialism. The latter's purpose is to create institutions which can gradually reduce the subordination of production to profit, do away with poverty, diminish inequality, remove social barriers to educational opportunities, and minimize the threat to democratic liberties from state bureaucracy and the seductions of totalitarianism. II Like many of us anglophone social democrats, Kolakowski regards Marx not as an epitome of socialism, but as a distraction from it. This is not just because Marx was overimpressed by philosophy, nor because he had the misfortune of being used as a front man by a whole rogues' gallery of bloody tyrants, but because he does not tell us much about how to go about creating institutions which might do these various jobs. Just about the only constructive suggestion Marx made, the abolition of private property, has been tried. It did not work. So now it is hard to find what Derrida calls a 'political imperative' in Marx an imperative more specific or more novel than the old, old injunction to prevent the rich from continuing to steal from the poor. Suppose Derrida had written 'it will always be a mistake not to keep thinking about the possibilities of building institutions which will foster the aims of democratic socialism, and not to bear in mind the

ruthlessness, deviousness and hypocrisy of the opponents of those aims' instead of writing 'it will always be a mistake not to read and reread Marx'. Then it would have been very easy to agree with him. He would have got the same ready assent if he had written 'Not without socialism' instead of 'Not without Marx', provided that he had joined Kolakowski in distinguishing between socialism as the nationalization of industry and socialism as the building of institutions which will achieve the aims he and Kolakowski share. Kolakowski could, I think, easily agree with Derrida that the current gloating over the end of socialism in the first sense should not distract us from trying to build socialism in the second sense. But, like me, he might be puzzled by Derrida's claim that, 'In order to analyze these wars and the logic of these antagonisms [those created by protectionism, GAT T , overproduction, foreign debt, etc.] a problematics coming from the Marxist tradition will be indispensable for a long time yet.'12 Derrida does not do much to back up this latter claim. He alternates between treating Marx as the thinker who reminded us ofJustice , of The Democracy To Come (a function one might think fulfilled equally well by Jaures, or by Debs), and Marx as somebody who formulated a 'problematics' which we don't get from anybody else. But he doesn't specifY what it is about Marx's sense of injustice that makes his formulations of politico-economic problems especially useful, nor just what this utility consists in. He does offer (at pp. 81-4) a helpful list of ten current dangers which threaten to render vain all of Europe's hopes: rising unemployment, the exclusion of homeless citizens from political participation, ruthless economic warfare between nations, the globalization of the labour market, foreign debt, the arms industry, nuclear proliferation, inter-ethnic wars, the mafia and the drug cartels, and the impotence ofinternational law. But he doesn't tie his discussion of these dangers in with anything characteristically Marxist. Why, one can reasonably ask, isn't Keynes at least as good as Marx, and maybe better, when it comes to analysing the antagonisms created by GATT, NAFTA, and the globalization of the labour and capital markets? Admirable recent discussions of these antagonisms, such as Fitoussi's Le Debat Interdit and Luttwak's The EndangeredAmerican Dream, seem to get along nicely without ever invoking anything specifically

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Marxist. It is hard to see that what Luttwak calls Bandenkriege (between, for example, the Cali and Medellin cartels, or between a cut-throat Azeri general and a bloodstained Annenian colonel) become more intelligible when placed within 'a problematics coming from the Marxist tradition'. One of the few places in Specters qf Marx at which the theme of spectrality hitches up with some fairly concrete discussion of economic matters is a section in which Derrida discusses Marx's notions of commodification and of use-value (roughly, pp. 150-70). Here is a typical excerpt: How do you recognize a ghost? By the fact that it does not recognize itself in a mirror. Now this is what happens with the ·commerce of the commodities among themselves. These ghosts that are commodities transform human producers into ghosts ... The 'mysteriousness' of the commodity-form as presumed reflection of the social form is the incredible manner in which this mirror sends back the image (zurueck-spiegelt) when one thinks it is reflecting for men the image of 'the social characteristics of men's own labour': such an image objectivizes by naturalizing ... The specular becomes the spectral at the threshold of this objectifying naturalization: 'it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists· apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution [quid pro quo], the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supersensible or social.'13 But is there anything mysterious, or spectral about commodities? One will find a mystery here only if one has a pretty primitive idea of value, or if one finds it weird that a thing should have the property it does by virtue of its relations to other things. There are, I suppose, some hick logocentrists who still think that some things or properties (the 'natural' and 'real' ones as opposed to the 'cultural' and 'artificial' ones) are what they are apart from any such relations. Such simple souls may still be impressed, or indignant, when the line between the natural and the social, the substantial and the relational, or the essential

and the accidental, is blurred. But only such naifs are still susceptible to the line ofpatter which we antiessentialist philosophers have developed. ('Ha! Fooled you! You thought it was real, but now you see that it's only a social construct! You thought it was just a familiar object of sense-perception, but look! It has a supersensible, spectral, spiritual, backside!') There is not, in fact, much na.lvety left these days. Tell a sophomore at an American college that something is only a social construct, and she is likely to reply, 'Yeah, I know. So are you, Mac.' It's not really news that everything is what it is because of its difference from everything else. So it is hard to know who is going to be intrigued by the following deconstruction of Marx's distinction between use-value and commodity-value: Marx wants to know and make known where, at just what precise moment, at what instant the ghost comes on stage . . . Weare suggesting on the contrary that, before the coup de theatre of this instant, before the 'as soon as it comes on stage as commodity, it changes into a sensuous supersensible thing' the ghost had made its apparition, without appearing in person, of course and by definition, but having already hollowed out in use-value, in the hardheaded wood of the headstrong table, the repetition (therefore substitution, exchangeability, iterability, the loss of singularity as the experience of singularity itself, the possibility ofcapital) without which a use could never even be determined. 14 In other words, the table was no more or less relational, and therefore spectral, after it got commodified than in the good old days when it was just used, and not traded. Spectrality goes all the way back, and all the way down. The hollowness of the hardheaded wood will be familiar to people who, in Derrida's words, 'understand Greek and philosophy'.15 We who have read Aristode's Metaplrysics andJonson's Tzmber are on good terms with hyle (a Greek word for 'wood' which Aristode uses to mean 'matter'). We get the point, and the joke. We can happily agree with Derrida, that '[Marx's] genealogy, which transforms the ligneous into the non-ligneous ... also gives a tableau of the becoming-immaterial

I ~f
250, 253, 26g and language, 138 as antidemocratic, xxx and pragmatism, 24 and Baier, 76 and the self, 78 and clarification of ideas, and truth, 32-3, 36, 37 de Man, Paul, 18, 129, 141, 109 and the community, 163 143,212 and core of his thought, Debs, Eugene, 203 deconstruction, 219-20 237 and democracy, 25-6, 29, deconstructive literary 49, III, 119-21, 126 criticism, 140, 142, 145 and dualisms, 52 democracy, 3, 23, 25-6, and education, 118 28-9, 116, 117, 173, 193, and Emerson, 120, 126 274 and Freud, 78 and capitalism, 244

on the function of Durkheim, Emile, 181 philosophy, 66 Dworkin, Ronald, 83, 93, and growth, 28,120,126 94-5,9 8 ,99 and Hegel, 30, 31, 211 and justification, 149 Eagleton, Terry, 40 15 Keatsian vision, 97 Eccles, Sir john, 184 and knowledge, 23, 29, 33 Eco, Umberto, 131-46 education: on Marx, 30-31 and morality, 23 Dewey and, 118 and morality/prudence, higher, 116, 117, 118, 120, 122-5, 127-8 73,74,75 and Nietzsche, xxix-xxx individuation, 117 on philosophy, 29, 109, and the left, 114-16, 117 110 pre·college, 120, 121, 122 and Platonic dualisms, xiv primary, 116, 117, 118 and the Platonic tradition, quality of, 121 xii and the right, 114-17 and pluralism, 237 secondary, 116, 117, 118, and pragmatism, xvii, 8, 123 as socialization, 115, 116, 24,88,95,98 and rationality, 23 117 and science, 36 teachers' pay, 121 and the scientific method, and truth, 117 xxii egalitarianism/ egalitarians, scorning, 8-9 xxxi, 23, % 99 and the self, 77 -8, 80 Eisenhower, Dwight, 245 and social Eliot, T. S., 9, 97, 196 Ely, Richard, 99 constructionism, 49 and social democracy, xiii, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 18 25-6, 120, 253, 254, 26g and truth, 18, 31-2, 37, Dewey and, 120, 126 119, 121 dialectical materialism, 8 and hope, 120 and self-reliance, 34 difference, 234, 235, 237 and 'true' definitions, dignity/value, 80, 81 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 139, 141 96 -7 disciplinary matrix, 178 empiricism/empiricists, xxi, Divine Will (Will of God), 34> 35, 48 , 55 'dogmas of empiricism', 83, 84, 150, 171, 172, 184, 203, 237 117 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 271 Empson, Sir William, 144 Dred &ott decision, 99 Engels, Friedrich, 201, 202 Enlightenment, xxviii-xxix, Dreiser, Theodore, 249 Du Bois, W. E. B., 253 xxx, 17, 107, 110, II I, dualisms, xi, xiii, xiv, xxi, 29, 133, 168, 16g, 170, 172, 31, 52, 97, 133, 152-3 174,230 Dummett, Michael, 95 epistemology, 105, 108, 173

essentialism/ essentialists, 53, 55,58,59,64,66 ethnic separatism, 235 Euclid,1I2 Eurocentrism, 212, 227 European Community, 250 Euthyphro, 108 Evers, Medgar, 257 evidence, 150, 151, 152 evolution: biological, 38, 75, 26g cultural, 75, 87 evolutionary theory, 68 existentialism, 211 experimentalism, 120 fascism, 8, 17 feminism, 87-8, 129, 229, 235 feudalism, 120 Feyerabend, 35, 95 Fichte,johann Gottlieb, 67 First Great Depression, 248 Fish, Stanley, 140, 142, 144, 182 Fitoussi, 215 fludd, Robert, 131, 133 Fodor,jerry, 95 formalism, 93, 94, 97 Forster, E. M., 223-8 Foucault, Michel, xx, 4, 12, 47,48, 115, 116, 119, 128, 129, 131, 168, 237, 238 and the archaeology of knowledge, xxii and genealogy, xxii and self-knowledge, 236 and social constructionism, 49 found/made, xix, xx, xxi, xxiii foundationalism, 151, 152, 164 foundationalists/ antifoundationalists, xxix

~ it

I

282 Frank, john, 6 fraternity, 248, 249, 251 freedom, 114, 115, 258 academic, 116, 1I7, 123, 125 economic, 115 expanding, 129 narrative of, 121-2 political, 115 and truth, 114, lIS, 118-19, 121 Frege, Gottlob, 24, 31, 56-7, 68 French Revolution, 2Gg Freud, Sigmund, 78, 84, 87, 128, 133, 144, 181, 219, 23 6 , 263 Frye, Northrop, 176 fundamentalism, religious, xxvi, 157, 276 Gabel, Peter, 94Gadamer, Hans-Georg, xx, xxii Galbraith,john Kenneth, 245,259 Galen, 179 Galileo Galilei, 38, 176, 179 GATT, 215 gay liberation, 129, 229, 235 gaybashing, xxxi, 17, 172 Geertz, Clifford, 263, 271, 272,275 General Motors, 255, 258 genetics,26.j. George, Henry, 218-19 Gitlin, Todd, 260 globalization, 215, 221, 231, 232-4, 250, 258 Goedel, Kurt, 178 GoodWill,83 good/ evil, xxx Goodman, Andrew, 24, 25, 33,177,257 grammatology, xxii

gratification, xxx greater-happiness principle, xxx Grey, Thomas, 93, 96, 97, 99, 104, 105, 106, 108 growth, 28, 120, 125, 126, 233 Grunbaum, Adolf, 181 Guzman, Abiel, 205 Habermas,jOrgen, 30, 32, 98, 107, 108, 110, 119, 149, 168, 170, 173, 193, 238 Hacking, Ian, 12 Hackney, Sheldon, 252-3 Hallam, Arthur, 168 Hanson, 95 Hart, Herbert, 108 Hartshorne, Charles, 28 Harvey, William, 179 Havel, Vaclav, 17 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xxi, xxxii, 11-12,20,67, 128, 179, 182, 218, 219, 220 and Dewey, 30, 31, 211 and Kant, 16 and Marx, 30 and pragmatism, 30 subject/ object, 49 hegemonic discourse, 130 Heidegger, Martin, xiii, xiv, xx, 4, 12, 29, 97, 144, 146, 179, 182, 190-97, 212, 213, 219 and Aristotle, 191 and Being, 19o, 191 and democracy, 196 on metaphysics, xix, 28, 48 ,132 and metaphysics, 191 Nazism, 18, 191-7 and the onto-theological tradition, xxiii and phenomenological ontology, xxi

and pragmatism, 28, Igo-91 and rationality, 24 reality/appearance, Igo and Thinking, xxii and truth, 24 Heisenberg, Werner, 184 Helsinki Declaration of Human Rights, xxxiii, 83 Henry VIII, King, 206 Hercules, 94-, 96 hermeneutics, xxii, 137, 140 Hirsch, E. D., 117, 118, 121-5,134Hitler, Adolf, 8, 17, 193, 275 Hobbes, Thomas, 59, 231-2, 26s,26.j. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 25, 93,99 Holocaust, 193 homogenization, 237 homosexuality, xxxi, 236, 246,276 Hook, Sidney, 8, 19, 35, 95, 192,211 hope, 265 Emerson and, 120 loss of, 232 national, 121-2, 254 political, 229 social, 2.j.8, 277 utopian, 229 Howe, Irving, 253, 254 human equality, xxx human nature, 118, 125, 126, 156,168 human rights, unconditional, 83-8 human suffering, xxx humanism, 17 humanistic intellectuals, 127-46 humanities, 127-30 Hume, David, 67, 76, 105 morality as a matter of sentiment, 87

28 3 and Plato, 77 and reason, 153 Humphrey, Hubert, 18 Hunter,james Davison, 16, 17 Husserl, Edmund, 176, 179 Hutchins, 8 Hutchinson, Allan, 94

t 1,

and pragmatism, xxii, 24, 159,160 religious hypothesis, 158, 163 and truth, 31-2, 151, 268 utilitarian, 140, 148 jaures,jean, 203 jefferson, Thomas, 105, 106, IGg, 170, 249, 259 jews, 253 johnson, Lyndon, 259 jonson, Ben, 217 joyce,james, 137, 138 justice, 7, 8, 9, 19,27, 107, 212, 213, 215, 248 social, 204, 238, 257 justification, 32, 34, 37, 38, 82, 149, 154, 159

identity, 234, 237 cultural, 235 ethnic, 229, 238 national, 229, 252, 253 politics of, 235 relativization of, 236 religious, 229, 238 ideology, 31 individualism, 26, 245 liberal,4, 17, 172,225,227, Kant, Immanuel, xvii, xxi, 237,256 individuality, 237 xxxi, xxxii, 19,34,67, individuation, 117 107, 148, 176, 178, 219, Industrial Revolution, 264, 276 2Gg categorical imperative, industrialization, 203, 245 xxx, 75; 265 inquiry, xxvi, xxviii, 37, 68, and dignity/value, 80, 81 119,238 the fixed and external, intellectual responsibilities, 111-12 154 GoodWill,83 intellectual rigour / sensual and Hegel, 16 sloppiness, 133 'holy will', 79 International Monetary and juridical vocabulary, Fund,225 III intrinsic/extrinsic, 50 and the moral self, 77 morality as a matter of irrationality, 275 irredentism, 229 reason, 87 and Nietzsche, 23 James, William, xiii, xiv, and reason, xxx, 77, 265 xvii, xx, 15, 17,28,31, and Sartre, 13 35,36 ,47,58,61, 'Thing-in-Itself', 49, 54, 148-64, IGg, 268-71, 58 and unconditionality, 67 27 6 and Clifford, 150 and universality, 75 and gratification, xxx Keats,john, 97 and the Platonic tradition, Kerensky, Alexander, 18 xii Kermode, Frank, 141, 144, and polytheism, 161-2 145

Keynes,john Maynard, 215 KGB, 204 Kierkegaard, Soren, 30, 159-60,220 Kierkegaardians, 108 King, Revd Dr Martin Luther,jr, 253, 257 knowledge, 3, 34-, 36, 148, 2Gg antipresentational view of, xxviii the archaeology of, xxii coherence theories of, 96 Davidson and, 33 Dewey and, 23, 29, 33 dream of perfect, xxviii as an end in itself, xii historical, IIO Hume and, 67 moral,84 nonlinguistic, 55-6 as power, 50 religion 'as a source of moral knowledge', 173 scientific, 183 towards greater human happiness, xii Kojeve, Alexandre, 218, 219 Kolakowski, 210, 214, 215 Kozody, Neal, 3 Kraffi-Ebbing, Richard, 5, 7 Kripke, Saul, 185 Kuhn, Thomas, xvii, xx, xxii, 12, 35-6, 95, 105, 175-8 9 Kundera, Milan, 20 KUng, Hans, 106 labour movement, 255, 256 Labour Party (Britain), 255 labour unions, 255, 256, 259, 260,261 see also trade unions Lacan,jacques, 236, 238 Laclau, Ernesto, 232 language: and antiessentialism, 55-9

28 4

28 5 Mill,james, 120 Mill,john Stuart, xxxi, 17, Lucretius, 88, 263, 264 120, 148, 154, 235, 236, Luther, Martin, 110 267,271 greater-happiness Luttwak, Edward, 215, 216, principle, xxx 258 ,259 Luxemburg, Rosa, 203 liberal utopia, 272 Nietzsche mocks, 26g and pluralism, 237 McGilvary,97 and right action, 268 McGovern, George, 260 Macintyre, Aiasdair, 12, 155, Miller, Hillis, 129, 142, 143, 156 146 McKeon, Richard, 8 Milosevic, Slobodan, 275 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 25-6 mind/body, 133 Moore, Michael, 95 Mann, Thomas, 193 moral choice, xxix, xxx Mansfield, Harvey, 3 Mao Tse-tung, 192, 205, 206 moral consciousness, 127 marginalized groups, 252, moral obligation, 14, 15, 76, 260 78-80, 82, 83 moral principles: Marx, Karl, xxi, II, 87, "5, firm, xxx-xxxii 20], 202, 205, 210 and Derrida, 211-21 universal, xxxi, xxxii forecasts proletarian moral progress, 76, 79, 8 I, revolution, 230, 232 82, 86, 87, 246 moral relativism, xxx and Hegel, 30 vision of the victory of the morality, xxix, 67, 78, 79 proletariat, xii-xiii Dewey and, 23, 73, 74 Marxism-Leninism, 20 and law, 73 Plato and, 80 Marxists/Marxism, 14, 15, and prudence, xvll, 72-6, 19,31, u8, 202, 204, 21 I, 212, 2]3, 215, 216, 1# thick and thin, 219-20,225,227,231, xxxii-xxxiii 232 materialism, 263 Mouffe, Chantal, 232 mathematics, 176, 180 multiculturalism, 252 274 Maturana, Humberto, xxiv Mussolini, Benito, 192 bourgeois, 236 Liebling, A. j., 7 Mead, George Herbert, 237 NAFTA, 215 Lincoln, Abraham, 205, 254, meaning, 109 and significance, 134 Nagel, Ernest, 95, 97 259 Nagel, Thomas, 109 Lind, Michael, 258, 259, 274 Mendel, Gregor, 264 Meno,267 linguistic turn, 24-5 nationaIism,253 natural science, xxvi, xxix, Locke,john, xxiv, 25, 34, 55, metaethics, 105, 108 metaphysics, xix, xxiii, 28, 68, 105, 178, 231-2 59,122,181 31, 48, 80, 84, 105, 108, naturalism, xxi, 36-7 logic, 177 symbolic, 178, 179 nature, 27, 110, 115, 26g 132, 141, 142, 143, 191, logocentrism, 219, 221 and culture, 140, 141 23 6 Microsoft, 258 passional, 152, 153, 155 Lov~oy,Arthur,97

language - cont. as a barrier, 50, 64 Darwinian way oflooking at, 65 Davidson and, 138 history of, 74-5 and its object, xxviii literary, 141, 143 origin of, 68, 74 positivists and, 151 Latour, Bruno, 47 law, 93-100, 104-12 moral, 237, 272 morality and, 73 pragmatism and, 93 Le Pen,jean-Marie, 258 left, the, 4, 19, 248, 252-4 and being true to ideals, 129 and education, 114-16, "7, 126 and mapping culture, 180 and Marx, 211 reformist liberal, 123 revolutionary radical, 123 legal realism, 93, 94, 95 Lenin, Vladimir llyich, 18, 205 Lentricchia, Frank, "5 Levinson, Harold, 164 Lewis, David, 95, 97,157 Lewis, Sinclair, 16 liberal arts curriculum, 125 liberalism, 172, 225, 271, 272,

Luban, David, 105, 106-9, III

nature/convention, xx, JIg and Eco, 135 Nazis, 8, 15, 16, 18, 85, 86, and pragmatism, 24, 35, 19 1-97,210 55 'the reality of Thirdness', Neidegger, 235 neo-Thomists, 8, 191 134 Neuhaus, Richard, 3 and science, 36 New Left, 192, 260 'System', 134 New Science, 67 and truth, 43, 149 New Testament, 201-9 philosophy: aim of, 109 Newton, Sir Isaac, 68, 84, 87 Nietzsche, Friedrich analytic, xxii, 177-82, 187 Continental, 181 Wilhelm, 4, 5, 26, 47, definition, 109 61, "5, 133, 191, 210, distinguished from 220, 235, 236, 265, 268, science, 139 27 1,276 as antidemocratic, xxx function of, 66 and Dewey, xxix-xxx, 23 and knowledge, 29 origin of, 29 Heidegger and, 195 and human brotherhood, political, 231, 232 positivistic analytic, 96 84 inversion of Platonism, of science, 156, 182 126 scientific, 95, 176-9 and Kant, 23 social, 231, 232 mocks Mill and Darwin, physical science, 60-61 26g physics, 173, 179, 181 and Plato, 23 laws of, 182, 183, 184, 187 on Truth, xvll Piaget,jean, 184 Nietzscheans, xxix, 130 Plato, xi, xvii, xx, 9, 12, 15, nominalism, 237 16,19,34-5,51, 105, 110, 112, 118, 120, 219, numbers, 52-7, 61, 63 Nuremberg Laws, 206 276 and erotic teacher-student 'objective', 50-51 objective immortality, 163 relationships, 125 objectivity, 3, 18,93, 159 Forms,63 Okrent, Mark, 19o and Hume, 77 ideal state, xii orthodox, the, 17, 18 and the left, "5 pantheism, 12, 16 and mathematics, 176 and morality, 80 Paraceisus, 133 particle physics, 59-60 and Nietzsche, 23 secularist philosophical Pater, Walter, 7 Paul, St, 88 tradition, 264-5 Whitehead on, xix Peano, Giuseppe, 61, 62 Peirce, Charles Sanders, xii, Platonism, xi, xix, 9-10, 12, xxv, 20, 24, 25, 68, 173 20,48, 263 inverted, 126 and a belief, 148

pluralism, 237, 252, 266 philosophical, 271, 275, 276 ,277 Poe, Edgar Allan, 135 poetry writing, 170 politics, xxi, xxvi, 83, I II, 129,254 academic, 260 class, 255-61 of diversity, 227 identity, 231 leftist, 260 polytheism, 161-2 Popper, Karl, 31, 36, 220 positivists, 151-2 Posner, Richard, 94-6, 98, 99, 104, 105-6, III, 112 post-Darwinian philosophy, xx post-Nietzschean philosophy,xvll,xx postmodernism/ postmodernists, xiii-xiv, 4, 5, 17, 18, 19, 168, 262, 276 po~er, xx, 8 commercial, 273 knowledge as, 50 military, 273 money, 245 political, 207 practice/theory, 1# pragmatism/pragmatists: accusations against, 80-81 as an American philosophy, 23, 25 'the apotheosis of the future', 27 banality of, 93, 95 classical, 240 25, 27, 35, 159 and Darwinism, 26g Dewey and, xvll, 8, 24, 88,95 Donaldson and, 24 Dworkin and, 93 Hegel and, 30

286

28 7 pragmatism - cont. Heidegger and, 28, 190 and inquiry, 72 James and, xxii, 24, 159, 160 and moral progress, 86 neopragmatists, 2{, 25, 27,

the triumph of, I15 reason/experience, 75 redescription, 87-8 reductionism, xxi racism, 4, 247 Radin, Margaret, 93, 96, 99 Reformation, 'II Randolph, A. Philip, 6, 259 reformism, bourgeois, 203 rational certainty, 10 relational/nonrelational, 81 rationalism, 120 relationality / relations, xix, 35,95 rationality, xx, xxxi, 36, 81, Peirce and, 2{, 35, 55 53-4, 56, 57, 68 relativism, xiii-xiv, xvii, philosophical force, 99 234 communicative, 149 and realists, '50-51 xxix, xxx, xxxiii, 15, 33 theists, 156 Dewey and, 23 cultural, 276 Heidegger and, 24 postmodern, 276 and truth, 33-4 and utilitarianism, 268, Ratzinger, Cardinal, 106 religion, 31, 120, 148, 149-50 Rauschenbusch, Walter, James' definition, 160 27 6 -7 Pragmatist's Progress, 133-4 philosophy of, 154 206,249 Prigogine, llya, ,84 Rawls,John, 107-8, Ill, 170, privatized, 149, 150, 171 progressivists, '7 and science, 149, ISS, 268 '73,232 proletarian revolution, 230, 'as a source of moral reading lists, '30 knowledge', 173 reading texts, '44-5 232 proletariat, 201, 202, 206, Reagan, Ronald, 4, 202, 260 religious argument, 172 Reuther, Walter, 259 realism, 150, 151,224 233 properly moral/merely realists and pragmatists, Riesman, David, 181 prudent, 24 right, the, 4-5 150-51 Proust, Marcel, II, '3, 20, reality, xxiv, 7-8, 9, 19, 27, and education, I14, I15, 220 I16, I17, 126 29,36,49,82,84,86, prudence, morality and, xvii, 104-5, I19, 157,237,272 and mapping culture, 180 non-human, 26g and reason, I14, I17 72- 6,144 psychological nominalism, objective, 183, 184, 185 Rio de Janeiro, 231 representing, 26g, 270 Rnad Warrior (film), 274 48 , 49, 54> 55 psychologists, 18, Robertson, Reverend Pat, using, 270 psychology, depth, 181 reality/appearance, xx, xxi, 205 psychopaths, 77, 78 xxiii, 2{, 50, 51, 54, 72, Roev. Wade, 98, 99 Ptolemaic astronomy, ,80 Romanticism/Romantics, 81, '33, ,go pure radiance/diffuse reality/fiction, 97 27, 97, 265, 267 reason, xviii, xxix, xxxii, Romer v. Evans, 246 reflection, 133 Putnam, Hilary, xx, xxii, Roosevelt, Franklin, 258, xxxiii,5, 10, 27, 68, 74, xxiii, xxviii, 25, 47, 75, I10, I14, 148, 275 259 97-8, 106, 182 communicative, 110 Roosevelt, Theodore, 245 and Lewis, 95 Hume and, 153 Rorty, Richard xi-xii, 3, 4, and pragmatism, 24, 88 and imagination, 97 105, 106, 183 and scientism, 36 Ross, Andrew, 183 Kant and, xxx, 77,265 and truth, 32 monological, 238 Rousseau,Jean:Jacques, I15, and passion, 77 I18, 219 Quine, William, xx, xxii, 31, 'pure practical', xxx Russell, Bertrand, 23, 31,48, and the right, I1{, I17 36 , 138 , 139, 177, '78 , 97,17 6 -9 subject-centred, I10 Russian Revolution, 5 235 and Carnap, 25 and pragmatism, 24

Sand, Judge, 98 Sartre,Jean-Paul, xx, 2I1, 220 and Kant, 13,61-2, 193 and phenomenological ontology, xxi and Proust, 13 Sartreans, 62 Savonarola, Girolamo, 13 Schlesinger, Arthur, 245, 259 Schwerner, Michael, 257 science, xvii, xxi, 31, 36, liD, 2I1, 227 creationist, 149 distinguished from philosophy, 139 the method of, 35 normal, ,80 philosophy of, 156, 182 as problem-solving, xxii and religion, 149, 155, 268 scientific method, xxii, 35-6, 95- 6 ,17 6 scientific philosophy, 95, 176-9 scientific realists, 156-7 scientificity, 179 scientism, 36 Searle,John, 3, 105, 106, 182 Second Great Depression, 248 secularization, 168 self, 77-81, 163-4 true, I14, I17, I19 self-creation, I18, 123, 126, 193, 265 self-individualization, I18 self-knowledge, 236 self-reliance, 34 selfish/unselfish, 77 Sellars, Wilfrid, 48, 49, 109, I10, 156, 177, 178 semiosis, 133, 139, 140, 141 semiotics, 133, 139 Sendero Luminoso movement, 205 Sennett, Richard, 181, 253 separatist movement, 229

sexism, 4 Shaw, George Bernard, 192, 224 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 265 significance, meaning and, 134 Sinclair, Upton, 249 Skinner, B. F., 176, 177, 181 slavery: abolition of, 225 chattel, 245 wage, 245 Snow, C. P., 188 Soares, Luiz Eduardo, 229, 23 1 social behaviour, 95 social construction(ism), 49, 85-6,237 social cooperation, xii, xiv social democracy / democrats, 8, 97 and Dewey, xxix, ,8 James and, xiii see also democracy 'Social Gospel' movement, 206, 249 social science, xxvi, 95, 96, 181 socialism, 17,205,214,215, 220, 244 revolutionary, 248 socialization, 115-18, 120, 121,124 society: civil, 273 classless, 230, 246 democratic, 126, 238 disciplinary, 4 Lentrecchia on, I15 liberal, 126 reformist and democratic, 124-5 and the true self, I17 and truth, I15 sociologists, 181 Socrates, 9, 15, 63, 84, I10, 125, 264, 267

'Sokal hoax', 182 soul, the, 107, I14 Spencer, Herbert, 30 Spinoza, Baruch, 61 Spinozists, 62 Stalin, Joseph, 5, 6, 192 standard ofliving, 273 Steinbeck, John, 248, 249 Stephen, Fitzjames, 98, 162 Stevens, Wallace, 97, 126 Stoicism, II, 67 Stout,Jeffrey, 140, 142 Strauss, Leo, 8, I18 Straussians, 14, 15, 129, 130, 21 9 strikes, 255-6 Stroud, Barry, 109 subject/object, xix, xx, xxi,

xxviii, 47, 49 subjectivity/objectivity, 142 supernatural, the, xxx, xxxiii Supreme Court, 98, 101, 106, Ill, 246-7 Sweeney, John, 256 Sykes, Charles, 128 Tate, Allen, 97, 196 Taylor, Harriet, 236, 267 technologism, 17, 192 technology, 227, 228 television, 121 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 168 Thatcher, Margaret, 206 Thinking, xxii Thomas, Norman, 6, 8 Thomas, St, 8, 10, I10 Thomists, 14, 108 Thompson, E. P., 31 Tillich, Paul, 156, 158, 206 Tillichians, 108 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 245 totalitarianism, 214, 273 Toulmin,95 trade unions, 206-7, 246, 249,274

see also labour unions

288 Trotsky, Leon, 5, 6, 8, 13, 17, United Auto Workers, 18 truth, xviii, xix, xxviii, 3, 5, 8, 18,31-3,38-9,97, 114, 148 , 2340 238 Davidson and, 32-3, 36, 37

Dewey and, 18, 23, 31-2, 37, 119

and education, 117 and freedom, 114, 115, 118-19, 121

Heidegger and, 24 James and, 31-2, 151, 268

Nietzsche on, xvii Peirce and, 32, 149 and pragmatists, 33 -4, 81-2

United Nations, 234 United Nations Charter, xxxiii, 231

United Nations Organization, 274 universal/individual, 77 universalism, 238, 271 universality, 75, 229, 230 University of Chicago, 7-11, 16,124

use-value, 216, 217 utilitarianism/ utilitarians, 73-4, 148 , 149, 157, 160, 267, 268, 270, 271, 273, 274,276 and pragmatism, 268, 276-7

Putnam and, 32 responsibility to, 148, 149 and society, 115 universal, 67, 208 Twain, Mark, 29 tyranny, 120 unconditionality, 67, 83 u~conscious,

255-6

78

Unger, Roberto, 94-5, 100

Valery, Paul, 145 Vienna Circle, xxi Vietnam War, 260 Wagner Act, 129 Walzer, Michael, xxxii Waugh, Evelyn, 196 Weber, Max, 128, 181, 211, 227

Weinberg, Steven, 182-8 Wells, H. G., 224 West, Cornel, 26, 97, 253 White, Morton, 93, 97 Whitehead, Alfred North, xix, 28,56, 163, 109

Whitman, Walt, 4,17,19, 24-8, 32, 120, 164, 234, 250 ,259 Williams, Bernard, 144, 157 Williams, Michael, 34

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xxiv, xxviii, 12, 56, 58, 131, 132, 177, 178, IBg, 235, 237

Wolin, Sheldon, 3-4 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 236 women's suffrage, 129 Woolf, Virginia, 168 Wordsworth, William, 164 Worker's Defense League, 6

World Bank, 225 Wright, Richard, 250 Yardley, Jonathan, 4 Yeats, W. B., 7, 192 Young, Iris Marion, 237 Young Hegelianism, 30